Descartes : [electronic resource] an intellectual biography / Stephen Gaukroger
Material type: TextPublisher: Oxford : New York : Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1995Description: xx, 499 pages : illustrations ; 25 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 0198239947
- 9780198239949
- 194 20
- B 20
- B1875 .G38 1995
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
E-Resources | Main Library E-Resources | 194 G268 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | E003031 |
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Includes bibliographical references
Introduction -- 'A learned and eloquent piety' -- An education in propriety, 1606-1618 -- The apprenticeship with Beeckman, 1618-1619 -- The search for method, 1619-1625 -- The Paris years, 1625-1628 -- A new beginning, 1629-1630 -- A new system of the world, 1630-1633 -- The years of consolidation, 1634-1640 -- The defence of natural philosophy, 1640-1644, Melancholia and the passions, 1643-1650 -- Notes
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is the father of modern philosophy, and one of the greatest of all thinkers. This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English; it offers a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work. Stephen Gaukroger, a leading authority on Descartes, traces his intellectual development from childhood, showing the connections between his intellectual and personal life and placing these in the cultural context of seventeenth-century Europe
Descartes' early work in mathematics and science produced ground-breaking theories, methods, and tools still in use today. This book gives the first full account of how this work informed and influenced the later philosophical studies for which, above all, Descartes is renowned. Not only were philosophy and science intertwined in Descartes' life; so were philosophy and religion. The Church of Rome found Galileo guilty of heresy in 1633; two decades earlier, Copernicus' theories about the universe had been denounced as blasphemous. To avoid such accusations, Descartes clothed his views about the relation between God and humanity, and about the nature of the universe, in a philosophical garb acceptable to the Church. His most famous project was the exploration of the foundations of human knowledge, starting from the proof of one's own existence offered in the formula Cogito ergo sum, 'I am thinking therefore I exist'
Stephen Gaukroger argues that this was not intended as an exercise in philosophical scepticism, but rather to provide Descartes' scientific theories, influenced as they were by Copernicus and Galileo, with metaphysical legitimation. This book offers for the first time a full understanding of how Descartes developed his revolutionary ideas. It will be a landmark publication, welcomed by all readers interested in the origins of modern thought
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