Book description
René Descartes 1596-1650 The 'father of modern philosophy', René
Descartes has been accorded all the admiration a father customarily
receives - and all the resentment. That mind-body duality by which he so
deftly made sense of us now seems less paradigm than prison. And yet, to
unthink it appears impossible. For better of worse, Descartes must
remain our starting-point in the attempt to understand ourselves and our
relation to our world. Yet if the problems begin with Descartes, so too
may some of the solutions. John Cottingham's fascinating guide finds in
the French philosopher's own neglected later work some intriguing hints
as to how the stumbling-blocks might be surmounted. The father of modern
philosophy, it seems, might yet be his child's deliverer. John
Cottingham is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, and
is editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy. He
is co-translator of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (1985-1991),
author of Rationalism (1984), Descartes (1986), The Rationalists (Oxford
History of Western Philosophy, 1988), A Descartes Dictionary (1993) and
editor of The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (1992) and Western
Philosophy, an Anthology (1996).
