Descartes A Biography
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loginRen ́e Descartes is best remembered today for writing “I think, therefore I am,”buthis main contribution to the history of ideas was his effort to constructa philosophy that would be sympathetic to the new sciences that emerged inthe seventeenth century. To a great extent he was the midwife to the ScientificRevolution and a significant contributor to its key concepts. In four major pub-lications, he fashioned a philosophical system that accommodated the needsof these new sciences and thereby earned the unrelenting hostility of bothCatholic and Calvinist theologians, who relied on the scholastic philosophythat Descartes hoped to replace. His contemporaries claimed that his proofsof God’s existence, in theMeditations,were so unsuccessful that he must havebeen a cryptic atheist, and that his discussion of scepticism served mainly tofanthe flames of libertinism. Descartes died in Stockholm in obscurity butsoon became one of the most famous philosophers of the seventeenth century,a status that he continues to enjoy today. This is the first biography in Englishthat addresses the full range of Descartes’ interests in theology, philosophy,and the sciences and that traces his intellectual development through his entirecareer.
