Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes

by Richard A. Watson

Rene Descartes was a highly influential philosopher, mathematician, and scientist and is regarded as the Father of modern philosophy and mathematics. This is the biography of Descartes, and it describes the life of Descartes, in the flesh and blood, rather than a technical analysis of his philosophical, scientific, and mathematical ideas.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Renaissance, Biography Memoir

375 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2002

About the author

Richard Watson is a recognized and pre-eminent Cartesian scholar and until his retirement was a professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. He now lives in Missoula, Montana.

Reviews

[Raully · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written with a very self-aware white male biographer who inserts his cranky and (rightfully) skeptical historian self right into the text. Given the tenuousness of the evidence at hand and the propensity to hagiography of other Cartesian biographers, I found the author’s persona endearing and helpful. More cynical readers might not.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This indeed is more biography than philosophy though the author teaches the subject at Washington University. As such, it seems as thorough as extant sources--many of which the author distrusts--allow. However, the final section, the 'Conclusion' does address the mind/body problem Descartes failed to solve. It is, arguably, the central problem of philosophy.

Insofar as Descartes as thinker is addressed beyond the mind/body business it is in terms of his application of mathematics to the physical world, this very much being the major factor in the progress of the sciences in the seventeenth century.

Unlike most books written by academic philosophers, this one is actually amusing, the author probably being an entertaining lecturer.

[PABLO ANTONETTI · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este libro es un ensayo biográfico de la vida de Descartes. Nos describe Watson, la brillantez de este personaje con sus manifiestos vigentes en la actualidad. Abunda en los detalles y en las fechas lo que lo hacen algo pesado.

[Tlaura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautiful book has made me feel all mushy about Descartes, something I never would have felt possible. It's irreverent and laugh-out-loud funny in parts, like when Watson drily comments regarding Descartes' missing three years tooling around Germany during the start of the Thirty Years War that "previous biographers have helpfully placed him in several battles". After surveying the evidence, Watson concludes (pretty compellingly) that Descartes likely spent most of those three years in Paris and its environs, and that few young men of philosophical or ecumenical leanings, like Descartes obviously had, would have willingly located themselves in Germany during that period. Self conscious myth busting is usually a bad look in history of thought, often a mask for re-tooling Great Man myths to fit modern conceptions of what a Great Man should have looked and thought like. But Watson avoids that trap. His Descartes is a grand, but imperfect, un-modern, pious, frustrating, enigmatic, sometimes tragic figure.

Still, there are parts of the book where I feel like I'm reading in a foreign language. In the somewhat absurdist introduction, Watson makes Descartes out to be one of the most despised figures in the history of thought, the bete noire of sentamentalists, new-agers, environmentalists, self-help gurus etc., basically of all modern merchants of woo who cling to fuzzy notions of meaning in a materialist world. I'm sure there are lots of examples of woo-merchants and sentamentalists (and certainly animal rights activists) hating on Descartes. But the huge amount of shade thrown at Descartes that I've come across -- by Newton, by Leibnitz, by Voltaire, by Delambre, by all stripes of modern science historians -- is something quite different: they hold variously that Descartes was a plagiarist, a sloppy empiricist and designer of useless grandiose theories, a jealous and uncooperative colleague, and/or an overpraised jingoist symbol of French superiority, a dumb nationalism emblem. There are many perfectly hard-headed criticisms of Descartes and they have echoed through the centuries. Watson doesn't touch them. Rather, he at one point claims that Newtonian science, and Newton's and Leibniz' calculus, both merely finished what Descartes started. But virtually nobody saw Newtonianism as an outgrowth of Cartesianism before the 19th century. Then Watson attributes the achievements of modern anatomy and medical research to Descartes and I have to scratch my head. Vesalius, Platter, Harvey, Redi ... none were Cartesians or even mechanists. And people certainly didn't need Descartes' legitimization to torture animals for human benefit. Harvey for one was doing it long before Descartes arrived on the scene.

Still, none of this (or some of Watson's factual mis-statements, like that Galileo remained employed in Italy after 1616 as a fortifications engineer or that Mersenne was an outspoken critic of Aristotle) really detracts from the beauty of the book. As prose, as a celebration of a remarkable human life, it's funny and readable and audacious and humanizing. The quite nice, and somewhat devastating, final chapter summarizes what Descartes got right and wrong from the standpoint of current neuroscience and philosophy of mind, which has, I think, very interesting implications for our concepts of morality, both towards each other and toward animals. Overall, you won't learn too much about Descartes' philosophy, his mathematics or his scientific achievements in his great Discourse on Method from this book. But as straight-up biography and historiography it is great, great stuff.

[Mark Haag · Rating 3 out of 5]

To begin, this is a Life of Descartes, not primarily a philosophical biography, even though Watson is a Professor of Philosophy.

Watson is an engaging writer-he puts himself inside Descartes' life and times. More than that, he doesn't edit his thinking process overmuch-he includes old anecdotes, family jokes, and snarky comments-upon reading Descartes detailed description of a live dissection of a dog's beating heart, Watson merely comments "Man's Best Friend". That is good stuff, and there's lots more like it.

You will learn a lot about inheritance laws, social and medical conditions of the time, and above all, the political situation. It is hard to keep the players straight-and was apparently hard even for Descartes, who tried to live by the Motto "A life well hidden is a life well lived", but got in trouble when we broke that motto to get closer to royalty. If you believe religion is used today by leaders as a cynical ploy for power, you aint seen nothing.

Watson is often ruthless with Descartes, and very critical of early hagiography. That makes you trust him in his estimation of Descartes personal strengths. An example that seemed important to Watson and me: he seems to have done right by his "illegitimate" daughter-something probably not frequently done in his time.

His introduction and conclusion give broad but clear overviews of Descartes' philosophy and legacy. You will understand why we are all Cartesians, and also why some feel that this a terrible mistake. This writing is done with a pretty broad brush, however, and I found myself thinking the author was more careful about the historical details of Descartes' life than he was in his explanation of the current mind-body debate.

[Andrew Pessin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really wonderful. It's beautifully written and gives you a very powerful feeling for the great man himself, and it happens to be very funny at times as well. It focuses more on the man than on his work, though you will get some discussion of his philosophy as well as of why he was so influential. ....

[E.A.M. Van · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deze, niet-intellectuele, biografie van Descartes leest vlot weg, hetgeen misschien wel alles zegt. Veel anecdotes, een aardig historiografisch overzicht van wat tot nu toe biografisch over Descartes geschreven is en min of meer gefundeerde gissingen over zijn persoonlijke leven. Al met al best aardig, maar niet echt wat je mag verwachten van een biografie van een van de grondleggers van de moderne filosofie. Dit mag Watson eigenlijk niet verweten worden, aangezien hij niet meer pretendeert dan hij aflevert. De auteur en zijn vrouw volgen Descartes' omzwervingen door Europa, in het bijzonder door Nederland, en doen allerlei koddige observaties over ons Vaderland en zijn inwoners. Dat gezegd hebbende, kan je natuurlijk je bedenkingen hebben bij een biografie waarin, out of the blue, op blz 165 vermeld wordt dat: 'Descartes had a plan. He was a man
of immense self-regard and of immeasurable ambition.' Aan de andere kant verdient Watson applaus voor de grappigste index sinds die van het Vaticaan. In welke serieuze historische publicatie kom je nou index-lemma's tegen als: 'Breast, Madame Chevreuse's peeps out, 254'? en wordt 'Goat' direct gevolgd door 'God'.