Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius

Descartes and the Jesuits, in C. Casalini (ed.), Jesuit Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity, Brill, Boston-Leiden 2019, pp. 405-425, 2019

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1997

The article addresses the fundamental elements of Descartes’ embeddedness in the mediaeval and ancient tradition. The more elaborate explication of the common elements, shared by Descartes and his predecessors, enables us to reveal more clearly the rupture point in Descartes’ thought, and shows clearly in the direction of his undisputed legacy for the later times, including French Materialism. Special attention is paid to M. Heidegger’s claim, based on his specific understanding of the history of philosophy, that Descartes represents the paradigmatic shift in the self-understanding of man, which crucially marks the latter development of philosophy, both idealistic and materialistic. Yet another author worthy of explicating in this context is M. A. Gillespie, who clearly adopts Heidegger’s view and further corroborates Descartes’ ontological shift to be read from his markedly different theology. Keywords: Descartes; Enlightenment; metaphysics; rational theology; ontology

JHP Volume 52, Number 4, October 2014, 844-845 DOI: 10.1353/hph.2014.0082

On the 400th anniversary of Descartes s birth, Anthony Grafton considers the forces that shaped the man and his thought by Anthony Grafton philosophers have theories. Good philosophers have students and critics. But great philosophers have primal scenes. They play the starring roles in striking stories, which their disciples and later writers tell and retell, over the decades and even the centuries. Thaïes, whom the Greeks remembered as their first philosopher, tumbled into a well while looking up at the night sky, to the accompanying mockery of a serving maid. His example showed, more clearly than any argument could, that philosophy served no practical purpose. Those who take a different view of philosophy can cite a contrasting anecdote, also ancient, in their support: after drawing on his knowledge of nature to predict an abundant harvest, Thaïes rented 36 WQ Autumn 1996 out all the olive presses in Miletus and Chios. He made a fortune charging high rates for them; better still, he showed that scholar rhymes with dollar after all. the other end of Western history, in the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein held that propositions are, in some way, pictures of the world: that they must have the same "logical form" as what they describe. He did so, at least, until he took a train ride one day with Piero Sraffa, an Italian economist at Cambridge. Making a characteristic Italian gesture, drawing his hand across his throat, Sraffa asked, "What is the logical form of that?" He thus set his friend off on what became the vastly influential Philosophical Investigations, that fas-

Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2011

In this Forum paper I examine how Orlander and Wickman represent Descartes philosophy, noting that while it might be tempting to apply one facet of a philosopher's argument, such as Descartes separation of mind and body, by doing that we do not capture the development of his thinking. I propose the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl can assist researchers to move beyond simple dichotomies.

2018

Considered an intimate instrument of expressing ideas and arguing different theoretical stances, Descartes’ philosophical correspondence is widely recognised as a solid introduction to the historical and scientific aspects of his significantly writings. Nevertheless, the epistolary tradition associated with the Cartesian corpus of philosophical texts reveals a privileged access to certain problems claimed by the Republic of Letters, placing Descartes’ intellectual attitudes as reactionary approaches of major European events, such as Galileo Galilei’s condemnation by the Inquisition, arousing a high caution in launching potential contradictory thesis to the dogma of the Catholic Church, or the successful experiments of Pascal, that created a compatible scientific area with Descartes’ assumptions from The Principles of Philosophy.