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The World and Man
In late 1633, as Descartes was preparing The World and Man for publication, he learned that Galileo had been condemned by the Catholic Church for defending the motion of the earth. His reaction to the news was swift and as his own treatises also espoused the proposition deemed heretical, he canceled their publication. More than thirty years after Descartes had begun his project, these works were finally published, posthumously, both to acclaim and to controversy. Together, they profoundly influenced the course of modern philosophy. This volume presents Roger Ariew’s clear and engaging translations of Descartes’s treatises, along with a general Introduction, describing the long road to publication, the reception of the works, and their significance. Appendices provide selections from Descartes’s correspondence on Galileo, Part V of the Discourse on Method, and a summary of Descartes’s Description of the Human Body.
- GenresPhilosophy
176 pages, Paperback
Published September 29, 2023
About the author
René Descartes
1,670 books2,533 followers
Meditations on First Philosophy
(1641) and
Principles of Philosophy
(1644), main works of French mathematician and scientist René Descartes, considered the father of analytic geometry and the founder of modern rationalism, include the famous dictum "I think, therefore I am."
A set of two perpendicular lines in a plane or three in space intersect at an origin in Cartesian coordinate system. Cartesian coordinate, a member of the set of numbers, distances, locates a point in this system. Cartesian coordinates describe all points of a Cartesian plane.
From given sets, {X} and {Y}, one can construct Cartesian product, a set of all pairs of elements (x, y), such that x belongs to {X} and y belongs to {Y}.
Cartesian philosophers include Antoine Arnauld.
René Descartes, a writer, highly influenced society. People continue to study closely his writings and subsequently responded in the west. He of the key figures in the revolution also apparently influenced the named coordinate system, used in planes and algebra.
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul , a treatise on the early version of now commonly called emotions, he goes so far to assert that he writes on his topic "as if no one had written on these matters before." Many elements in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or earlier like Saint Augustine of Hippo provide precedents. Naturally, he differs from the schools on two major points: He rejects corporeal substance into matter and form and any appeal to divine or natural ends in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of act of creation of God.
Baruch Spinoza and Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz later advocated Descartes, a major figure in 17th century Continent, and the empiricist school of thought, consisting of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, opposed him. Leibniz and Descartes, all well versed like Spinoza, contributed greatly. Descartes, the crucial bridge with algebra, invented the coordinate system and calculus. Reflections of Descartes on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought; much later, the invention of the electronic computer and the possibility of machine intelligence impelled this thought, which blossomed into the Turing test and related thought. His stated most in §7 of part I and in part IV of Discourse on the Method .
A set of two perpendicular lines in a plane or three in space intersect at an origin in Cartesian coordinate system. Cartesian coordinate, a member of the set of numbers, distances, locates a point in this system. Cartesian coordinates describe all points of a Cartesian plane.
From given sets, {X} and {Y}, one can construct Cartesian product, a set of all pairs of elements (x, y), such that x belongs to {X} and y belongs to {Y}.
Cartesian philosophers include Antoine Arnauld.
René Descartes, a writer, highly influenced society. People continue to study closely his writings and subsequently responded in the west. He of the key figures in the revolution also apparently influenced the named coordinate system, used in planes and algebra.
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul , a treatise on the early version of now commonly called emotions, he goes so far to assert that he writes on his topic "as if no one had written on these matters before." Many elements in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or earlier like Saint Augustine of Hippo provide precedents. Naturally, he differs from the schools on two major points: He rejects corporeal substance into matter and form and any appeal to divine or natural ends in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of act of creation of God.
Baruch Spinoza and Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz later advocated Descartes, a major figure in 17th century Continent, and the empiricist school of thought, consisting of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, opposed him. Leibniz and Descartes, all well versed like Spinoza, contributed greatly. Descartes, the crucial bridge with algebra, invented the coordinate system and calculus. Reflections of Descartes on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought; much later, the invention of the electronic computer and the possibility of machine intelligence impelled this thought, which blossomed into the Turing test and related thought. His stated most in §7 of part I and in part IV of Discourse on the Method .
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 1, 2025
I went into this book presuming it was a mostly philosophical work... this was incorrect. This is more akin to Descartes' version of a science textbook and contains mostly his breakdowns of physics and anatomy. There are some philosophical underpinnings here (corpuscularianism is a nice word you make you sound smart), but this is not a primarily philosophical work.
That being said, it wasn't a horrible read. Descartes's understandings are obviously out of date and often wrong, but I did find a new respect for him by seeing how dedicated he was as a scientific mind. And it helped that Roger Ariew's was, as Descartes would put it, clear and distinct enough to make such a dense (and surprisingly small) work accessible.
By no means a bad book and it certainly accomplishes the goal it is aiming for (to explain Descartes' understanding of the mechanics of the world and man), but unless you're looking to better understand Descartes' scientific theories it is probably of no interest to you.
That being said, it wasn't a horrible read. Descartes's understandings are obviously out of date and often wrong, but I did find a new respect for him by seeing how dedicated he was as a scientific mind. And it helped that Roger Ariew's was, as Descartes would put it, clear and distinct enough to make such a dense (and surprisingly small) work accessible.
By no means a bad book and it certainly accomplishes the goal it is aiming for (to explain Descartes' understanding of the mechanics of the world and man), but unless you're looking to better understand Descartes' scientific theories it is probably of no interest to you.
October 16, 2026
very interesting, first time reading this more scientific side of descartes. Its strange to see an almost proto-physicalism and it makes his descriptions of animals even more strange given he describes humans in nearly the same manner, as complex automaton. But when you read something like the discourses, you get an anthropocentric view where humans for some reason are endowed with a mind and rationality while every other aspect of the world works in the mechanistic view presented in this text. It seperates humans from the natural world, we are the only things that have this special quality, everything works like a fine tuned clock or other machine, while we have a body that is a machine and a mind which is free of any deterministic laws of nature that can control this body.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews