The Story of Philosophy: A History of Western Thought by James Garvey & Jeremy Stangroom

Author:James Garvey & Jeremy Stangroom
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2012-05-16T23:00:00+00:00

René Descartes, in a portrait attributed to Frans Hals (c.1649 or later). The painting now hangs in the Louvre.

Descartes prepared for life as a lawyer but quickly saw that it wasn’t for him. He became a soldier and then something of a wanderer, ‘mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me’. Fortune offered him a number of testing situations with people of diverse ranks, including the experience of running up impressive gambling debts and fighting a duel over a romantic connection. After all this excitement, he sequestered himself in Holland for many years, pursuing mathematics, science and philosophy. His work in mathematics was particularly fruitful, and among other things he paved the way for analytical geometry. Cartesian coordinates are named after him.

The culmination of his efforts is a large treatise called The World, which lays out a general system that Descartes hoped might supersede Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, securing a firm foundation for the new sciences. Among other things it defends a heliocentric view of the solar system. But just as he was about to publish, Galileo came under censure for propounding the same view, and with great reluctance Descartes put the project on hold. Instead, he published a sample of his work from the book, prefacing it with a ‘Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences’. The sample chapters and The World have since faded in the shadow of that preface, which has become the free-standing Discourse on Method. It’s among the most agreeably readable of philosophy’s classic texts, written to interest and convince not just theologians and scientists, but the powdered and cultured frequenters of Parisian salons. For the first time since antiquity, a philosopher made an effort to speak to everyday people. The book is a page-turner. You’re swept up by Descartes’ hope and enthusiasm – you’re right there with him in his search for the truth.

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