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Descartes: An Intellectual Biography
René Descartes's insights into the nature of knowledge and the mind have inspired awe and debate through the centuries. But while philosophers have sought to understand the ramifications of his theories, they have paid much less attention to how, exactly, he arrived at his ideas. What twists and turns of his intellect brought him to his epochal conclusions? How did his personal ambitions and the social conditions of his era shape his thought? These questions and more are masterfully answered in Stephen Gaukroger's Descartes , a fascinating look at this most influential of all Renaissance thinkers.
In his quest to retrace Descartes's development as a scientist and philosopher, Gaukroger leaves no stone unturned. From the great man's first book on music theory ( Compendium Musicae ) to his masterworks Discours , Essais , Meditationes , and Principia , from his study of mathematics while attending a Jesuit college at age ten, through his dying days in the service of Christina, Queen of Sweden, Descartes brims with penetrating and often surprising insights into the philosopher's life and work. We discover, for example, that he wasn't as concerned with developing an all-encompassing theory of knowledge as he was with establishing a natural philosophy that supported the teachings of Copernicus, a man whose work he deeply admired. We also learn that Descartes was willing to alter his publicly stated views to accommodate church doctrine--especially after witnessing Galileo's condemnation in 1633. We observe how his personal triumphs and failures--from his rumored nervous breakdown in
1614, to his joy at the popular reception of Discours and Essais , to his protracted and very public dispute with the implacable professor Voetius--affected his intellectual development. Along the way, Gaukroger details how Descartes's theories of metaphysics, mechanics, cognition, and cosmology have been both championed and distorted by philosophers of all stripes for over three hundred years. Packed with helpful diagrams and in-depth interpretations of Descartes's most celebrated works, the book also includes a useful chronology that highlights his important accomplishments and personal milestones.
Descartes is an exhaustively detailed, magisterial look at the dazzling intellectual achievements of the father of modern philosophy. Splendidly written by a renowned authority on the subject, it will serve as the definitive guide to Descartes's thoughts, works, and life for years to come.
In his quest to retrace Descartes's development as a scientist and philosopher, Gaukroger leaves no stone unturned. From the great man's first book on music theory ( Compendium Musicae ) to his masterworks Discours , Essais , Meditationes , and Principia , from his study of mathematics while attending a Jesuit college at age ten, through his dying days in the service of Christina, Queen of Sweden, Descartes brims with penetrating and often surprising insights into the philosopher's life and work. We discover, for example, that he wasn't as concerned with developing an all-encompassing theory of knowledge as he was with establishing a natural philosophy that supported the teachings of Copernicus, a man whose work he deeply admired. We also learn that Descartes was willing to alter his publicly stated views to accommodate church doctrine--especially after witnessing Galileo's condemnation in 1633. We observe how his personal triumphs and failures--from his rumored nervous breakdown in
1614, to his joy at the popular reception of Discours and Essais , to his protracted and very public dispute with the implacable professor Voetius--affected his intellectual development. Along the way, Gaukroger details how Descartes's theories of metaphysics, mechanics, cognition, and cosmology have been both championed and distorted by philosophers of all stripes for over three hundred years. Packed with helpful diagrams and in-depth interpretations of Descartes's most celebrated works, the book also includes a useful chronology that highlights his important accomplishments and personal milestones.
Descartes is an exhaustively detailed, magisterial look at the dazzling intellectual achievements of the father of modern philosophy. Splendidly written by a renowned authority on the subject, it will serve as the definitive guide to Descartes's thoughts, works, and life for years to come.
520 pages, Hardcover
First published March 30, 1995
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207 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Gaukroger
70 books27 followersStephen Gaukroger is a British philosopher and intellectual historian. He is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. Recently he also took up a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.
He received his BA (hons) in philosophy, with congratulatory first class honours, from the University of London in 1974, and his PhD, in history and philosophy of science, from the University of Cambridge in 1977. He was a Research Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge, and then at the University of Melbourne, before joining the Philosophy Department at Sydney in 1981. In 2011, he moved to the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Corresponding Member of l’Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, and in 2003 was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for contributions to history of philosophy and history of science. He is presently Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science, and ARC Professorial Fellow. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian.
He received his BA (hons) in philosophy, with congratulatory first class honours, from the University of London in 1974, and his PhD, in history and philosophy of science, from the University of Cambridge in 1977. He was a Research Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge, and then at the University of Melbourne, before joining the Philosophy Department at Sydney in 1981. In 2011, he moved to the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Corresponding Member of l’Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, and in 2003 was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for contributions to history of philosophy and history of science. He is presently Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science, and ARC Professorial Fellow. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 8, 2018
Meant for those undertaking a serious study of Descartes. Gaukroger writes in a clear and distinct way (ha). It contains several hundred pages of defunct physics and geometry diagrams, but there are also some great historical insights and useful, nuanced discussion on Descartes' positions throughout.
April 13, 2025
Dr. Gaukroger's effort in encapsulating Rene Descartes is, as the subtitle indicates, relative to the latter's intellectual efforts. But oddly, we get a fine personal picture from historical evidence due to his reconstructive historical surgery. From 1596 to 1650 (death in Sweden) he provides a chronology of events valuable in itself to researchers.
Sixty two pages alone prepare the reader for Rene's intellectual adventures, and these - showing a rather special person dominated by a politically-elevated and diffident father in a time of clerical (legal) worship in France - sets the scene for either. That is, the path of a rebel, or a path for one positively attempting to reify the past in what can only be called progressive ways. The Church saw him as a rebel. As the Jews might say, he was a mensch. In any case, he became a sensitive and empathetic humble student of Nature, and reset rules as to how she may be studied. One gets the impression from the exhaustive and fascinating reconstruction of France at this historical juncture by the author that certain persons were getting "fed up" with encrusting legal niceties and its attendant verbal logico-bulk onto academic structures already overweight to bursting from Aristotle and Plato (scholasticism) down the dusty post-Roman ages. Times were ripe for a change.
Or at least for adjusted modifications; re-constructions from data, in fact, if they were available. Descartes was certain that everything he was bringing about in 17th Century reformation Europe was just a matter of recreating what "had been" in the times of Ancient Greece. It was only either re-doing it or finding it buried somewhere (was he aware of the loss of most Ancient Greek writings in the Great Fire of Alexandria and the library there by the followers of Mohammad?) The path he chose led him to no special progress, in situ, in his time. You could call his theories that, and his enforced peripatetic hops over to Holland and Sweden that, too: he was too "hot" in fire branding future mental paths dangerously close to his French Catholic power base. But the fragments and starts of his work became the gemstones of his intellectual descendants: he was the pre-father of a mechanical cosmology (not the father - who was Newton, and who earnestly assumed the role of making a "Principia and an Optics" off of Rene's start); the improver of geometry stripping far ahead of the likes of Carbanus and other geometers (we think of the Cartesian coordinate system in his invention - analytical geometry); he paralleled Galileo in philosophical descriptions and discussions of perceiving Nature, though he dismisses empiricism as a clutterer of the understanding. One was the matter of how the body functioned. He wondered how we could, in a mechanistic way, learn and do more as he pondered Harvey's study of blood flow.
A vetted anecdote by Gaukroger revealed revulsion of Descartes's very being, insofar as he supposedly created a sort of human robot - a female one - due to his insistence of seeing life as kinds of mechanisms. It must've been false, him creating robotic women; but the ire or ridicule felt him for being "inhuman" was, according to Gaukroger, sincere. In a plague, his common law wife and daughter died of something ridiculously easy to cure by today's standards. His remark? (in effect) "it would be inhuman of me not to show grief on the deaths of my loved ones. But it would be unmanly of me to give in to my grief." He was treated as uncharitably then, it appears, as he is, now, in so-called postmodern scholastic attacks of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries - cruelly enough, for his work on "method." Were metaphysical steps such as his to arrange for a working functional science never taken, many postmodern scholastics would never have come to be.
A strict Catholic (though spied on by Roman state agents acting for the Church) Rene trimmed away the many leveled steps towards making a studious argument - the trappings of the scholastic. Charitably enough, he always said that these weren't wrong, per se: it was just that they had no place in formulating "clear and distinct" vs. artificial rules for thought constructs as preparation for proof, hopefully by math or logic or both. He himself intellectually aligned himself with scholastics by insisting on a dualism: a world made of math on one side and "thinking spirits" (the "thought substance") on the other. He falls into the trap, or at least cannot escape scholasticism totally. These are Res cognitans and res extensa. From extensa (extension) he differentiates form, unity, and dimension. He gave dimension the credit not for just length, width, breadth and depth, but also weight and velocity: mass and weight may've been more inclusively defined. As E.A. Burtt put it, "had he succeeded in carrying the thought through, we might today think of mass and force as mathematical dimensions rather than physical concepts." Math and physical science may've been made into one, in other words. True: but all men are limited. Alas, the same writer notes Descartes's "mind wandered," and such unclarity was assigned to vorticity and the Medieval-like fog of a universal substance he labeled "the aether" (ether). In parallel thinking, his duality included the soul. As his critic Thomas Hobbes (of Leviathan fame) accused, "we might go back to the scholastics' way of speaking" due to "M. Descartes (saying) ...the understanding understands, the vision sees, the will wills, and...walking, or at least the faculty of walking, will walk." (Haldane and Ross: The Philosophical Works of Descartes).
One thinks of Van Gogh in reverse: the Flemish painter fled to France to become a French painter. Trundling his bundle along on a thin minor royal's purse, Descartes proceeds to become the natural philosopher he searches to be in the Netherlands. The excitement of his work with Beeckman and their collegial interactions is not yet fogged by recrimination over precedence of discovery and Descartes's clear superiority. Way before this, Descartes had the famous vision on a German battlefield as a young military courier, wherein mysticism is inveigled by others, but Gaukroger shows more of something along the line of a nervous breakdown that had unexpected outcomes. What he claimed to see was the Angel of Truth: what he heard the angel tell him, in fine, was that mathematics was the sole way of reading Nature. Rene is a different character after that; no longer the nice French boy taking the strictures of staid parents. He even sees things far more mathematically, as if his cortex somehow gained more power for "clearer, more distinct" non-intuitive thinking. Lastly, the internal court wars that carried the later-famous and influential Descartes to that stronghold of Counterreformation, Sweden, to be the Protestant queen's teacher, reveals intriguers between royal houses and religions. On the one hand, Rene is seen as a positive influence on Christina (Kristina Augusta) revealing the rational and logical side of French thought in the face of the highly politicized and scholastic Catholics who still powered the Roman state intellectually. That angle of intriguers were believed to have murdered her teacher, reaching him there from continental Europe. The plot against him by "the forces of belief vs. reason" is reinforced, since the queen abdicates and moves to Rome and becomes a Catholic. But evidence to the contrary is detailed by Gaukroger. Rene's death in a Swedish winter in the Maunder (grand solar) Minimum in February, 1650 is very closely detailed. The fact that he had to be present to instruct Her Majesty far before sunrise at a time when sunrise occurred around 8:15 AM even when the sun shined - traveling to the castle over the bridge in frigid weather - makes his death from a bad cold far more believable than anything else. Of course, as to who stole his skull, or where it ("the real one") now is, or who poisoned his cold medicine etc. is relegated to interesting but unprovable speculation.
La Haye, where the savant was born, was partly renamed Descartes in his honor. After all, he is perhaps the greatest Frenchman who has so far lived. Why? Other than the hagiographic description of being one of the main humble shoulders stood upon by the other humble seeker, Newton, we see a soul enforcing simplicity of argument in order to be able to unlock the most difficult of problems from their roots, in part or - better yet - whole, when we can. It was not the scholastics' question of "why?" things are that he asked, but forced the matter how "how?" things worked. In the face of the too many who simply follow or believe, or both, we must credit these few with great grasps of mathematics and insight with helping the "too many" as possible remain unmolested in the face of the frequent result of uncaring: the "too many's" being controlled.
Sixty two pages alone prepare the reader for Rene's intellectual adventures, and these - showing a rather special person dominated by a politically-elevated and diffident father in a time of clerical (legal) worship in France - sets the scene for either. That is, the path of a rebel, or a path for one positively attempting to reify the past in what can only be called progressive ways. The Church saw him as a rebel. As the Jews might say, he was a mensch. In any case, he became a sensitive and empathetic humble student of Nature, and reset rules as to how she may be studied. One gets the impression from the exhaustive and fascinating reconstruction of France at this historical juncture by the author that certain persons were getting "fed up" with encrusting legal niceties and its attendant verbal logico-bulk onto academic structures already overweight to bursting from Aristotle and Plato (scholasticism) down the dusty post-Roman ages. Times were ripe for a change.
Or at least for adjusted modifications; re-constructions from data, in fact, if they were available. Descartes was certain that everything he was bringing about in 17th Century reformation Europe was just a matter of recreating what "had been" in the times of Ancient Greece. It was only either re-doing it or finding it buried somewhere (was he aware of the loss of most Ancient Greek writings in the Great Fire of Alexandria and the library there by the followers of Mohammad?) The path he chose led him to no special progress, in situ, in his time. You could call his theories that, and his enforced peripatetic hops over to Holland and Sweden that, too: he was too "hot" in fire branding future mental paths dangerously close to his French Catholic power base. But the fragments and starts of his work became the gemstones of his intellectual descendants: he was the pre-father of a mechanical cosmology (not the father - who was Newton, and who earnestly assumed the role of making a "Principia and an Optics" off of Rene's start); the improver of geometry stripping far ahead of the likes of Carbanus and other geometers (we think of the Cartesian coordinate system in his invention - analytical geometry); he paralleled Galileo in philosophical descriptions and discussions of perceiving Nature, though he dismisses empiricism as a clutterer of the understanding. One was the matter of how the body functioned. He wondered how we could, in a mechanistic way, learn and do more as he pondered Harvey's study of blood flow.
A vetted anecdote by Gaukroger revealed revulsion of Descartes's very being, insofar as he supposedly created a sort of human robot - a female one - due to his insistence of seeing life as kinds of mechanisms. It must've been false, him creating robotic women; but the ire or ridicule felt him for being "inhuman" was, according to Gaukroger, sincere. In a plague, his common law wife and daughter died of something ridiculously easy to cure by today's standards. His remark? (in effect) "it would be inhuman of me not to show grief on the deaths of my loved ones. But it would be unmanly of me to give in to my grief." He was treated as uncharitably then, it appears, as he is, now, in so-called postmodern scholastic attacks of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries - cruelly enough, for his work on "method." Were metaphysical steps such as his to arrange for a working functional science never taken, many postmodern scholastics would never have come to be.
A strict Catholic (though spied on by Roman state agents acting for the Church) Rene trimmed away the many leveled steps towards making a studious argument - the trappings of the scholastic. Charitably enough, he always said that these weren't wrong, per se: it was just that they had no place in formulating "clear and distinct" vs. artificial rules for thought constructs as preparation for proof, hopefully by math or logic or both. He himself intellectually aligned himself with scholastics by insisting on a dualism: a world made of math on one side and "thinking spirits" (the "thought substance") on the other. He falls into the trap, or at least cannot escape scholasticism totally. These are Res cognitans and res extensa. From extensa (extension) he differentiates form, unity, and dimension. He gave dimension the credit not for just length, width, breadth and depth, but also weight and velocity: mass and weight may've been more inclusively defined. As E.A. Burtt put it, "had he succeeded in carrying the thought through, we might today think of mass and force as mathematical dimensions rather than physical concepts." Math and physical science may've been made into one, in other words. True: but all men are limited. Alas, the same writer notes Descartes's "mind wandered," and such unclarity was assigned to vorticity and the Medieval-like fog of a universal substance he labeled "the aether" (ether). In parallel thinking, his duality included the soul. As his critic Thomas Hobbes (of Leviathan fame) accused, "we might go back to the scholastics' way of speaking" due to "M. Descartes (saying) ...the understanding understands, the vision sees, the will wills, and...walking, or at least the faculty of walking, will walk." (Haldane and Ross: The Philosophical Works of Descartes).
One thinks of Van Gogh in reverse: the Flemish painter fled to France to become a French painter. Trundling his bundle along on a thin minor royal's purse, Descartes proceeds to become the natural philosopher he searches to be in the Netherlands. The excitement of his work with Beeckman and their collegial interactions is not yet fogged by recrimination over precedence of discovery and Descartes's clear superiority. Way before this, Descartes had the famous vision on a German battlefield as a young military courier, wherein mysticism is inveigled by others, but Gaukroger shows more of something along the line of a nervous breakdown that had unexpected outcomes. What he claimed to see was the Angel of Truth: what he heard the angel tell him, in fine, was that mathematics was the sole way of reading Nature. Rene is a different character after that; no longer the nice French boy taking the strictures of staid parents. He even sees things far more mathematically, as if his cortex somehow gained more power for "clearer, more distinct" non-intuitive thinking. Lastly, the internal court wars that carried the later-famous and influential Descartes to that stronghold of Counterreformation, Sweden, to be the Protestant queen's teacher, reveals intriguers between royal houses and religions. On the one hand, Rene is seen as a positive influence on Christina (Kristina Augusta) revealing the rational and logical side of French thought in the face of the highly politicized and scholastic Catholics who still powered the Roman state intellectually. That angle of intriguers were believed to have murdered her teacher, reaching him there from continental Europe. The plot against him by "the forces of belief vs. reason" is reinforced, since the queen abdicates and moves to Rome and becomes a Catholic. But evidence to the contrary is detailed by Gaukroger. Rene's death in a Swedish winter in the Maunder (grand solar) Minimum in February, 1650 is very closely detailed. The fact that he had to be present to instruct Her Majesty far before sunrise at a time when sunrise occurred around 8:15 AM even when the sun shined - traveling to the castle over the bridge in frigid weather - makes his death from a bad cold far more believable than anything else. Of course, as to who stole his skull, or where it ("the real one") now is, or who poisoned his cold medicine etc. is relegated to interesting but unprovable speculation.
La Haye, where the savant was born, was partly renamed Descartes in his honor. After all, he is perhaps the greatest Frenchman who has so far lived. Why? Other than the hagiographic description of being one of the main humble shoulders stood upon by the other humble seeker, Newton, we see a soul enforcing simplicity of argument in order to be able to unlock the most difficult of problems from their roots, in part or - better yet - whole, when we can. It was not the scholastics' question of "why?" things are that he asked, but forced the matter how "how?" things worked. In the face of the too many who simply follow or believe, or both, we must credit these few with great grasps of mathematics and insight with helping the "too many" as possible remain unmolested in the face of the frequent result of uncaring: the "too many's" being controlled.
August 11, 2020
As any of the books of Gaukroger this is an extremely well written book, though sometimes very technical and daunting. It is obvious that he knows his subject in and out and is as such providing us with more than enough insight into at one side Descartes personal life and at the other side his Philosophical ideas. I like the more or less three parts into which this book falls apart (although not explicitly specified) which are : Following the old - Doubts - A new Philosophy. This I think worked extremely well in being able to follow the path Descartes took and how and why he eventually ended up where he ended up.
It was always clear to me that Descartes is one of the most important philosophers that ever lived and basically the one that sets the stage for modern philosophy. This is especially true for the Netherlands (where Descartes worked most of his life) and the development of Radical Philosophy and the circle that was surrounding Spinoza. Too often and too long the Enlightenment has been explained from the departure of Bacon & Newton but one can see here is that (although Descartes never intended that and really tried his best not to provoke the Church) the Dutch branch of the Enlightenment (Branded by Jonathan Israel as: Radical Enlightenment) took the ideas of Descartes further.
Highly recommend read, though again, might not be for the average reader.
I also recommend to read the book preferable together with Gaugroger's first book on the Scientific Revolution : The Emergence Of A Scientific Culture because that book will provide you with a lot of background that is absolutely necessary to understand this book and Descartes's ideas.
It was always clear to me that Descartes is one of the most important philosophers that ever lived and basically the one that sets the stage for modern philosophy. This is especially true for the Netherlands (where Descartes worked most of his life) and the development of Radical Philosophy and the circle that was surrounding Spinoza. Too often and too long the Enlightenment has been explained from the departure of Bacon & Newton but one can see here is that (although Descartes never intended that and really tried his best not to provoke the Church) the Dutch branch of the Enlightenment (Branded by Jonathan Israel as: Radical Enlightenment) took the ideas of Descartes further.
Highly recommend read, though again, might not be for the average reader.
I also recommend to read the book preferable together with Gaugroger's first book on the Scientific Revolution : The Emergence Of A Scientific Culture because that book will provide you with a lot of background that is absolutely necessary to understand this book and Descartes's ideas.
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July 25, 2024Este es un libro de estilo y precisión académica ejemplar. Trata la vida y obra de Descartes en un sentido que le permite establecer una interpretación muy bien argumentada de los motivos e incentivos para el desarrollo de las teorías de uno de los pensadores más revolucionarios de la historia del pensamiento moderno. Su estructura biográfica permite seguir el desarrollo cronológico del pensamiento y las obras de Descartes y ver como este se fue construyendo. Además, también es un libro que combate las interpretaciones más tópicas y dominantes de la historia de la filosofía que son patentemente falsas. Me ha parecido excepcionalmente interesante su distinción entre el método expositivo (el que se conoce como método cartesiano y que se usa en las meditaciones y los principios) y el método cognitivo propiamente dicho, que se basa en la resolución de problemas y en un proceso experimental más común. El libro desarrolla la titánica tarea de enmendar los clichés de un filósofo tan conocido como Descartes, y, por lo general, tiene éxito. Por último, el libro se centra enormemente en la filosofía natural de Descartes (la cual considera el centro de su pensamiento) sin ignorar sus aportaciones más conocidas en metafísica, lo cual le permite explicar el porqué de la mayor parte de las tesis metafísicas de Descartes a partir de sus motivaciones científicas naturales. Toda la exposición de la filosofía natural cartesiana goza de explicaciones de un detalle extremo que, si bien pueden ser excesivas si no se goza del interés o de los conocimientos para comprenderlo, permiten una mirada completa a sus desarrollos matemáticos y físicos.
Dicho esto, es como si para el último capítulo del libro el autor se hubiera cansado de escribir, puesto que su exposición de los "Principios de filosofía" está llena de erratas filosóficas que sencillamente no están abiertas a debate. Esto es especialmente doloroso cuando se trata de esta obra por su importancia intrínseca en todas las áreas del conocimiento en las que participó. En la página 391 llega a decir que "ser dependiente no impide a algo ser una substancia en si misma" (pongo la línea en inglés porque no es que mi traducción sea perfecta: "being dependant does not rule out something being a substance in its own right"), lo cual contradice radicalmente la definición que Descartes ofrece en el libro I párrafo 51 de los Principios ("Cuando concebimos la substancia, solamente concebimos una cosa que existe en forma tal que no tiene necesidad sino de sí misma para existir"). Bien es verdad que en el mismo párrafo Descartes reconoce que el término se dice equívocamente de Dios y de las substancias que solo dependen de Dios para existir, pero esto no quita que en general sus exposiciones se salen de afirmaciones que tienen una presencia radical en el pensamiento de Descartes, afirmaciones que además influyeron enormemente en el pensamiento cartesiano posterior como es este caso. Otro elemento bastante desacertado del libro a mi parecer es la omisión del cierto desarrollo posterior del cartesianismo por el lado de Spinoza. Si bien nombres como Arnauld o Malebranche se invocan con facilidad para indicar un tema que es desarrollado de forma problemática en el futuro, Spinoza es apenas mencionado pese a ser uno de los más prolíficos desarrolladores del pensamiento cartesiano y el responsable de llevar a sus consecuencias radicales las definiciones metafísicas que Descartes sienta.
Pese a estos dos profundos errores, esta es una excelente obra para aquellos estudiantes de filosofía (puesto que no recomendaría el libro a lectores ocasionales por su rigor académico) que bien se introducen al autor o quieren ampliar sus conocimientos sobre este explorando una nueva perspectiva interpretativa. Con ello se adquiere una basta bibliografía sobre el pensador francés así como una introducción de valor crítico muy potente.
Dicho esto, es como si para el último capítulo del libro el autor se hubiera cansado de escribir, puesto que su exposición de los "Principios de filosofía" está llena de erratas filosóficas que sencillamente no están abiertas a debate. Esto es especialmente doloroso cuando se trata de esta obra por su importancia intrínseca en todas las áreas del conocimiento en las que participó. En la página 391 llega a decir que "ser dependiente no impide a algo ser una substancia en si misma" (pongo la línea en inglés porque no es que mi traducción sea perfecta: "being dependant does not rule out something being a substance in its own right"), lo cual contradice radicalmente la definición que Descartes ofrece en el libro I párrafo 51 de los Principios ("Cuando concebimos la substancia, solamente concebimos una cosa que existe en forma tal que no tiene necesidad sino de sí misma para existir"). Bien es verdad que en el mismo párrafo Descartes reconoce que el término se dice equívocamente de Dios y de las substancias que solo dependen de Dios para existir, pero esto no quita que en general sus exposiciones se salen de afirmaciones que tienen una presencia radical en el pensamiento de Descartes, afirmaciones que además influyeron enormemente en el pensamiento cartesiano posterior como es este caso. Otro elemento bastante desacertado del libro a mi parecer es la omisión del cierto desarrollo posterior del cartesianismo por el lado de Spinoza. Si bien nombres como Arnauld o Malebranche se invocan con facilidad para indicar un tema que es desarrollado de forma problemática en el futuro, Spinoza es apenas mencionado pese a ser uno de los más prolíficos desarrolladores del pensamiento cartesiano y el responsable de llevar a sus consecuencias radicales las definiciones metafísicas que Descartes sienta.
Pese a estos dos profundos errores, esta es una excelente obra para aquellos estudiantes de filosofía (puesto que no recomendaría el libro a lectores ocasionales por su rigor académico) que bien se introducen al autor o quieren ampliar sus conocimientos sobre este explorando una nueva perspectiva interpretativa. Con ello se adquiere una basta bibliografía sobre el pensador francés así como una introducción de valor crítico muy potente.
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