A Very Short Introduction - Descartes

René Descartes had a short working life and it began late. He did not get down to sustained research in philosophy and the natural sciences until 1628, when he was thirty-two; it took him a further nine years to publish anything, and the last of his works to appear in his lifetime came out only twelve years after the first, in 1649. His output was not large. Yet he made fundamental contributions to physics, mathematics, and optics, and he reported useful observations in other fields, notably meteorology and physiology. Had he confined himself to the natural sciences his achievement would have been remarkable enough. But his range was in fact considerably wider. He is best known, perhaps, as the man who said ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ – ‘I am thinking, therefore I am’. This little piece of reasoning is the first principle of his metaphysics or first philosophy, his theory of what has to be known for stable and exact science to be possible at all. The metaphysical theory is extremely subtle, and its influence on philosophy down to the present day has been profound. Probably it is the most enduring of his intellectual achievements. But it was not intended to stand apart from his scientific work, let alone overshadow it. When Descartes turned to metaphysics at the beginning and towards the middle of his productive period, he developed a theory that was only supposed to clear the ground for the statement of his mathematical physics. By a complicated and very abstract argument, Descartes tried to prove that only properties well understood in geometry, namely length, depth, and breadth, were essential to matter, and that no properties but these geometrical ones and motion were needed to explain natural phenomena. Contents Texts and Translations ix List of Illustrations xi 1 Matter and Metaphysics 1 2 The Discovery of a Vocation 6 3 One Science, One Method 10 4 ‘Absolutes’, Simple Natures, and Problems 13 5 Roaming about in the World 20 6 Paris 25 7 The Suppressed Physics 30 8 Three Specimens of a Method 37 9 A New ‘Logic’ 45 10 The Need for Metaphysics 51 11 The Meditations 56 12 Doubt without Scepticism? 61 13 The Theologians and the God of Physics 65 14 Ideas 71 15 The Mind 77 16 Body 82 17 The Physics made Public 88 18 The ‘Other Sciences’ 94 19 Last Days 97 20 Descartes’s Ghost 101 Further Reading 107 Index 111