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The Cambridge Companion to Descartes
Descartes occupies a position of piviotal importance as one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy; he is, perhaps the most widely studied of all philosophers. In this authoritative collection an international team of leading scholars in Cartesian studies present the full range of Descartes' extraordinary philosophical achievement. His life and the development of his thought, as well as the intellectual background to and reception of his work are treated at length. At the core of the volume are a group of chapters on his the celebrated "Cogito" argument, the proofs of God's existence, the "Cartesian circle" and the dualistic theory of the mind and its relation to his theological and scientific views. Other chapters cover the philosophical implications of his work in algebra, his place in the 17th century scientific revolution, the structure of his physics, and his work on physiology and psychology.
456 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
John Cottingham
59 books26 followersJohn Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading.
Professor of Philosophy of Religion, University of Roehampton, London.
Visiting Professor, King’s College London.
Honorary Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford University.
John Cottingham has published over thirty books – fifteen as sole author, a further nine editions and translations, plus (either as single or joint editor) eight edited collections – together with over 140 articles in learned journals or books. From 1993-2012 he was Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy.
Professor of Philosophy of Religion, University of Roehampton, London.
Visiting Professor, King’s College London.
Honorary Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford University.
John Cottingham has published over thirty books – fifteen as sole author, a further nine editions and translations, plus (either as single or joint editor) eight edited collections – together with over 140 articles in learned journals or books. From 1993-2012 he was Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 20, 2022
When I read a companion to a historically important philosopher I expect to find 6 things. 1. Some kind of exposition of the philosophy. 2. An exposition of the deeper significance of arguments that might not be understood out of context or in translation. 3. The influence of earlier thought. 4. Influence on later thought. 5. Assessments of then correctness of the presented views. 6. Dispelling of misconceptions and drawing connections to show how the philosophy functions as a worldview.
The Cambridge Companion to Descartes fails in all regards.
1. It fails to give a proper exposition of Descartes philosophy. Only the introduction has a little of this. Why would you read a “Companion” to Descartes if it doesn’t help you get through the thought of Descartes? Understanding of Descartes’ philosophy is presupposed. They explain some of his physics but that’s hardly relevant today. Only people who’re really interested in Descartes for its own sake will like that.
2. I don’t remember any of the authors doing this. Indicative is the chapter on the Cogito. The author spends multiple pages pointing out that a certain argument is deductive, then murmurs on about deductions in general with some vague statements about simple logic. Then he moves on without having addressed the actual argument. I stopped reading that essay after that. This is also indicative of the exposition of Descartes’ basic principles in this volume.
3. There’s a little about scholasticism but the authors refuse to go into enough depth for me to draw anything concrete from that. There are lots of vague statements about Aristotle or Plato or someone else having “influenced” Descartes but in what way is still a mystery to me.
4. Here the companion almost succeeds. They indicate some of the ways in which Spinoza’s, Leibniz’s and Locke’s systems were influenced by Descartes. Nicholas Jolley, who wrote the chapter, is clearly the most intelligent author and is actually a good writer. What there is is pretty good, Jolley makes sure to give actual explanations rather than vague references and he doesn’t go off topic like many other authors. What there is is pretty good but it’s only a few pages. Definitely some stuff you won’t get from the Wikipedia page though.
5. Some of the authors have some strong opinions but are entirely unable to reason through them, for the most part. At one point Roger Ariew, one of the authors, says that cold can only be experienced as something positive if it is something positive and not just a lack of heat. Currently, I don’t actively feel heat but I’m pretty sure I feel a cold draft and the experience is different than that of just not actively experiencing heat. In fact, Ariew seems to believe, against all modern physics, that coldness is not a lack of heat but a physical force of its own.
6. I don’t remember anyone even trying.
If you’re looking for a single volume containing all the biographical information about Descartes you could ever want, interspersed with some ponderings of simple logic and descriptions of now obsolete physical science, written by strongly opinionated people who are unable to put their positions in a clear or logical way, this is the book for you! If you’re looking looking for a guide to deepening your understanding of Descartes, read any other book.
The Cambridge Companion to Descartes fails in all regards.
1. It fails to give a proper exposition of Descartes philosophy. Only the introduction has a little of this. Why would you read a “Companion” to Descartes if it doesn’t help you get through the thought of Descartes? Understanding of Descartes’ philosophy is presupposed. They explain some of his physics but that’s hardly relevant today. Only people who’re really interested in Descartes for its own sake will like that.
2. I don’t remember any of the authors doing this. Indicative is the chapter on the Cogito. The author spends multiple pages pointing out that a certain argument is deductive, then murmurs on about deductions in general with some vague statements about simple logic. Then he moves on without having addressed the actual argument. I stopped reading that essay after that. This is also indicative of the exposition of Descartes’ basic principles in this volume.
3. There’s a little about scholasticism but the authors refuse to go into enough depth for me to draw anything concrete from that. There are lots of vague statements about Aristotle or Plato or someone else having “influenced” Descartes but in what way is still a mystery to me.
4. Here the companion almost succeeds. They indicate some of the ways in which Spinoza’s, Leibniz’s and Locke’s systems were influenced by Descartes. Nicholas Jolley, who wrote the chapter, is clearly the most intelligent author and is actually a good writer. What there is is pretty good, Jolley makes sure to give actual explanations rather than vague references and he doesn’t go off topic like many other authors. What there is is pretty good but it’s only a few pages. Definitely some stuff you won’t get from the Wikipedia page though.
5. Some of the authors have some strong opinions but are entirely unable to reason through them, for the most part. At one point Roger Ariew, one of the authors, says that cold can only be experienced as something positive if it is something positive and not just a lack of heat. Currently, I don’t actively feel heat but I’m pretty sure I feel a cold draft and the experience is different than that of just not actively experiencing heat. In fact, Ariew seems to believe, against all modern physics, that coldness is not a lack of heat but a physical force of its own.
6. I don’t remember anyone even trying.
If you’re looking for a single volume containing all the biographical information about Descartes you could ever want, interspersed with some ponderings of simple logic and descriptions of now obsolete physical science, written by strongly opinionated people who are unable to put their positions in a clear or logical way, this is the book for you! If you’re looking looking for a guide to deepening your understanding of Descartes, read any other book.
March 29, 2012
A compilation of contemporary views on Descartes philosophy. The subjects that are covered include a look into his life, and the scholastic world in which he was born and thought, as well as his views on Metaphysics, Epistemology, Physics, Psychology and ethics. It finishes with an interesting essay on his influence in the 2 centuries following his death. An important book for anybody wishing to study Descartes, or simply wishing to know more about the man who has been called the Father of Modern Philosophy.
November 28, 2021
[ I should like to retract some portion of my initial assessment. Descartes was primarily a scientist, in the loose sense of the term, and less of a philosopher; least among his oeuvre is what might properly be considered philosophy. Thus i think it is perfectly appropriate for the essays to emphaze the scientific.:]
The Cambridge Companion Series continues to be an outstanding resource for the student, the scholar, and those in between. This volume is a number of essays on various aspects of Descartes’ thought, particularly his metaphysics, epistemology, and science. The contributors, who are well-known early modern philosophy experts (the early modern philosophy community is relatively small—go to 3 or 4 conferences and you’ll meet virtually all the ‘who’s whos’), aim to explain sufficiently the important areas of Descartes’ thought while also engaging with the scholarly debate in those areas. Thus, the authors both describe the basics of their respective topics as well as prescribe a course for interpreting the topic as they see best. The authors, therefore, exposit, explicate, and evaluate to the conclusion for which they respectively adhere. In doing so, the authors (remember, they all know one another to some degree and many are even friends) charitably formulate those interpretations and arguments with which they disagree, resulting in an exemplary edition of accessible Descartes papers. There is also a detailed bibliography.
The Cambridge Companion Series of major philosophers is intended to provide a full range of the achievements and ideas of the thinker in one volume. This volume on Descartes comes close to fulfilling this intention but misses the par just a bit. This is to say nothing negative about the quality of the essays, all of which are excellent. Rather it is to say that the editor’s selections lean a bit to the scientific. The essays in this volume are very much geared toward Descartes’ philosophy of science—his mathematics and physics. One good thing about this is that much explanation is devoted to scholasticism and the various ways in which Descartes negotiated his way through scholastic conceptions of substance, causation, motion, and evidence, sometimes retaining scholastic ideas, sometimes modifying them, and sometimes jettisoning them altogether. This emphasis on Descartes’ philosophy of science, therefore, gives the reader a nice bonus in the form of a little crash course in scholastic ontology and epistemology.
(This content is something most readers will not have learned, even if they’ve taken a number of philosophy courses. The reasons for this are at least twofold. First, most introductory courses cover Plato and Aristotle, then immediately jump to Descartes. If you’re lucky, you’ll get either Augustine or Aquinas before Descartes. If Augustine, you’ll not get any scholasticism; if Aquinas, you’ll probably only get scholasticism by association—-most intro instructors only have time to cover Aquinas’ conception of the soul or his Five Ways. In doing so, you might get a brief nod to scholastic Aristotelianism but usually not. The second reason is that most intro instructors don’t know much about medieval philosophy. It’s sad, but true. So, when you do have an instructor who knows medieval philosophy, particularly scholastic philosophy, feel privileged and proceed to shower this person with gifts, preferably money—not apples—because this person probably makes less than most kindergarten teachers.)
The weaknesses of this book—it’s over-emphasis on the science— also yields one of its strengths—good coverage of those scholastic notions with which Descartes contended and struggled. A further aspect of Descartes’ thought that is virtually omitted from this volume is his ethical views. You get a mention here and there, but no essay fully devoted to it. For this, the standard secondary work continues to be John Marshall’s Descartes’ Moral Theory. In defense of the editor, however, Descartes’ entire corpus consists of very little work on this area; furthermore, Descartes’ ethics is virtually unheard of in college philosophy departments, except by those very few who specialize in such matters (did I mention John Marshall?). But do not be disappointed, all the usual Cartesian suspects are lined up and well interrogated: mind/body, cogito, ontological argument, clear and distinct perceptions, cartesian circle, etc. (That was so hackneyed, but pointing it out is more so; and so is pointing out that I'm pointing out, ad infinitum.)
I’m aware of another criticism to this volume, one to which I do not subscribe. Some people have complained that this book was written entirely by ‘analytic’ philosophers. This is the sort of thing that disgruntled and confused ‘continentalists’ write when what they're reading isn’t predominately poetry, aphorisms, and nifty quips. I have no idea what Descartes scholarship would look like if it were to fall into the hands of the continentalists, but it would cease to be scholarship, instead it would take on the appearance of toilet water--the kind that is blue because of that thing in the back where the water fills up. (Yes, continentalists do exist—they are the ones that mysteriously seem to disappear from rigorous graduate programs in philosophy without having obtained their degrees.) They speak of this volume as being too ‘analytic’and hence consisting of biased interpretations, as if there were some other way of doing philosophy, silly fellows. Of course, they don't bother to explain what it is about being analytic that entials bais. I suggest they put down the Descartes scholarship and pick up Baudrillard or Holderlin; Derrida or Heidegger. Continentalists must learn to pay attention to claims, the raw material out of which arguments are crafted. To do otherwise sometimes can be meaningful, profound, and important, but can rarely be philosophy.
One of my favorite essays in this volume is Clarke’s “ Descartes’ Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Revolution,” the theme of which is twofold. First, that an understanding of Descartes’ contribution to natural philosophy—his concept of science—requires acute sensitivity to the historical context in which Descartes’ was working. Second, that this historical context generated epistemological and methodological problems which acted as constraints on Descartes’, and other natural philosophers’, ability to navigate the transition from the formal scholastic models to the new experimental mechanistic models of science. For this reason, while Descartes was a pivotal figure of the scientific revolution, he was not able to fully jettison the prevalent conceptual presuppositions of the schoolman, the scholastics.
Descartes’ scientific ideas were developed during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. During this time, Descartes contributed to two related developments in natural philosophy: changes in scientific practice, and changes in scientific explanation. These changes, resulting in a new model of science, occurred because the natural philosophers at the time challenged and repudiated the widely held scholastic model of science.
Clarke claims that the scholastic model of scientific knowledge consisted of a number of key notions. One was that all genuine knowledge claims are demonstratively certain or necessary; another was the claim that our knowledge of physical phenomena is jointly derived from sensory evidence and God’s guarantee of reliable cognitive faculties; and a further notion was the employment of hylomorphic descriptions of natural phenomena: all individual things and their respective activities were reduced to explanations of composite entities consisting of matter and form.
Scholastic accounts of the natural order became the object of Descartes’ philosophical critique. Contrary to the scholastics, Clarke shows that Descartes argued against the scholastic model when Descartes argued that it was the unreliability of sense perception that allows for scientific knowledge. Because there is a difference between the content of our subjective sensations and the objective causes of the objects that produce our sensations, we cannot demonstrably argue from our descriptions of subjective sensations to descriptions of objective causes. Sensation thus yields contingent knowledge of physical phenomena, and the physical causes of our ideas are best explained with reference to hypothetical assumptions—hypotheses—about material causes and effects, represented by mechanical models, not resemblance assumptions about formal causes.
Clarke notes that Descartes’ hypotheses fundamentally alter how scientific knowledge is explained. First, because hypothetical demonstrations refer solely to the size, shape, and motion of the particles of material bodies; second, because Descartes thought that explanations of physical phenomena invoking the distinction between matter and form were vacuous, pseudo-explanations: reference to forms inhering in things neither accounts for the production of the phenomena to be explained, nor renders the phenomena capable of observation. While it may be true that a magnetic body attracts certain bodies because it has a “magnetic form”, the principle of substantial forms on which this account depends is itself in need of explanation. In contrast, Clarke notes that Descartes’ explanations are made plausible by analogically representing the microscopic particles of material phenomena with large-scale models, thus fundamentally altering the way in which science is practiced; for instance, unobservable light particles are represented with billiard ball size wooden spheres. Descartes adoption of hypotheses shifts the sense of demonstration to one of contingency in which scientific knowledge is something less than that of pure mathematics; hence a Cartesian explanation is a hypothesis that may be false or significantly inaccurate with reference to the phenomena it purports to explain. According to Clarke, the limitations of hypothetical explanations motivated Descartes to ground them in an indubitable metaphysical foundation.
Clarke notes that at this point in Descartes’ thinking about the relative certainty of scientific explanations he is unable to discard the conceptual categories of the scholastics. Scholastic knowledge claims admitted of two kinds: the demonstrably certain, and the uncertain, amounting to mere opinion. Because Descartes thought that hypotheses, while less than certain, were more plausible than uncertain opinion, he attempted to describe the relative accuracy with which models and hypotheses represent reality within the bounds of this scholastic dichotomy. Clarke thinks that Descartes’ efforts here are a doomed attempt to classify the relative probabilities of the method of hypothesis with the unsophisticated concepts of certainty and uncertainty available to him. Clarke claims that Descartes tries to subsume his hypothetical scientific reasoning to a few demonstrable metaphysical principles; but Clarke claims that Descartes fudges between some principles as certain and others as probable, revealing the ambivalence in Descartes’ philosophy of science. Clarke notes that despite Descartes’ efforts to ground natural science in metaphysical certainty, he was still left with many difficulties relating to complex experimentation, observation and interpretation dependence, and variable identification when modeling.
Cartesian science, Clarke insists, nonetheless, differs markedly from scholastic science despite sharing certain conceptual categories. Descartes was committed to hypothetical explanations, not certain demonstrations, referring solely to matter in motion, not occult properties.
[ I should like to retract some portion of my initial assessment. descartes was primarily a scientist, in the loose sense of the term, and less of a philosopher; least among his oeuvre is what might properly be considered philosophy. Thus i think it is perfectly appropriate for the essays to emphaze the scientific.:]
The Cambridge Companion Series continues to be an outstanding resource for the student, the scholar, and those in between. This volume is a number of essays on various aspects of Descartes’ thought, particularly his metaphysics, epistemology, and science. The contributors, who are well-known early modern philosophy experts (the early modern philosophy community is relatively small—go to 3 or 4 conferences and you’ll meet virtually all the ‘who’s whos’), aim to explain sufficiently the important areas of Descartes’ thought while also engaging with the scholarly debate in those areas. Thus, the authors both describe the basics of their respective topics as well as prescribe a course for interpreting the topic as they see best. The authors, therefore, exposit, explicate, and evaluate to the conclusion for which they respectively adhere. In doing so, the authors (remember, they all know one another to some degree and many are even friends) charitably formulate those interpretations and arguments with which they disagree, resulting in an exemplary edition of accessible Descartes papers. There is also a detailed bibliography.
The Cambridge Companion Series of major philosophers is intended to provide a full range of the achievements and ideas of the thinker in one volume. This volume on Descartes comes close to fulfilling this intention but misses the par just a bit. This is to say nothing negative about the quality of the essays, all of which are excellent. Rather it is to say that the editor’s selections lean a bit to the scientific. The essays in this volume are very much geared toward Descartes’ philosophy of science—his mathematics and physics. One good thing about this is that much explanation is devoted to scholasticism and the various ways in which Descartes negotiated his way through scholastic conceptions of substance, causation, motion, and evidence, sometimes retaining scholastic ideas, sometimes modifying them, and sometimes jettisoning them altogether. This emphasis on Descartes’ philosophy of science, therefore, gives the reader a nice bonus in the form of a little crash course in scholastic ontology and epistemology.
(This content is something most readers will not have learned, even if they’ve taken a number of philosophy courses. The reasons for this are at least twofold. First, most introductory courses cover Plato and Aristotle, then immediately jump to Descartes. If you’re lucky, you’ll get either Augustine or Aquinas before Descartes. If Augustine, you’ll not get any scholasticism; if Aquinas, you’ll probably only get scholasticism by association—-most intro instructors only have time to cover Aquinas’ conception of the soul or his Five Ways. In doing so, you might get a brief nod to scholastic Aristotelianism but usually not. The second reason is that most intro instructors don’t know much about medieval philosophy. It’s sad, but true. So, when you do have an instructor who knows medieval philosophy, particularly scholastic philosophy, feel privileged and proceed to shower this person with gifts, preferably money—not apples—because this person probably makes less than most kindergarten teachers.)
The weaknesses of this book—it’s over-emphasis on the science— also yields one of its strengths—good coverage of those scholastic notions with which Descartes contended and struggled. A further aspect of Descartes’ thought that is virtually omitted from this volume is his ethical views. You get a mention here and there, but no essay fully devoted to it. For this, the standard secondary work continues to be John Marshall’s Descartes’ Moral Theory. In defense of the editor, however, Descartes’ entire corpus consists of very little work on this area; furthermore, Descartes’ ethics is virtually unheard of in college philosophy departments, except by those very few who specialize in such matters (did I mention John Marshall?). But do not be disappointed, all the usual Cartesian suspects are lined up and well interrogated: mind/body, cogito, ontological argument, clear and distinct perceptions, cartesian circle, etc. (That was so hackneyed, but pointing it out is more so; and so is pointing out that I'm pointing out, ad infinitum.)
I’m aware of another criticism to this volume, one to which I do not subscribe. Some people have complained that this book was written entirely by ‘analytic’ philosophers. This is the sort of thing that disgruntled and confused ‘continentalists’ write when what they're reading isn’t predominately poetry, aphorisms, and nifty quips. I have no idea what Descartes scholarship would look like if it were to fall into the hands of the continentalists, but it would cease to be scholarship, instead it would take on the appearance of toilet water--the kind that is blue because of that thing in the back where the water fills up. (Yes, continentalists do exist—they are the ones that mysteriously seem to disappear from rigorous graduate programs in philosophy without having obtained their degrees.) They speak of this volume as being too ‘analytic’and hence consisting of biased interpretations, as if there were some other way of doing philosophy, silly fellows. Of course, they don't bother to explain what it is about being analytic that entials bais. I suggest they put down the Descartes scholarship and pick up Baudrillard or Holderlin; Derrida or Heidegger. Continentalists must learn to pay attention to claims, the raw material out of which arguments are crafted. To do otherwise sometimes can be meaningful, profound, and important, but can rarely be philosophy.
One of my favorite essays in this volume is Clarke’s “ Descartes’ Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Revolution,” the theme of which is twofold. First, that an understanding of Descartes’ contribution to natural philosophy—his concept of science—requires acute sensitivity to the historical context in which Descartes’ was working. Second, that this historical context generated epistemological and methodological problems which acted as constraints on Descartes’, and other natural philosophers’, ability to navigate the transition from the formal scholastic models to the new experimental mechanistic models of science. For this reason, while Descartes was a pivotal figure of the scientific revolution, he was not able to fully jettison the prevalent conceptual presuppositions of the schoolman, the scholastics.
Descartes’ scientific ideas were developed during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. During this time, Descartes contributed to two related developments in natural philosophy: changes in scientific practice, and changes in scientific explanation. These changes, resulting in a new model of science, occurred because the natural philosophers at the time challenged and repudiated the widely held scholastic model of science.
Clarke claims that the scholastic model of scientific knowledge consisted of a number of key notions. One was that all genuine knowledge claims are demonstratively certain or necessary; another was the claim that our knowledge of physical phenomena is jointly derived from sensory evidence and God’s guarantee of reliable cognitive faculties; and a further notion was the employment of hylomorphic descriptions of natural phenomena: all individual things and their respective activities were reduced to explanations of composite entities consisting of matter and form.
Scholastic accounts of the natural order became the object of Descartes’ philosophical critique. Contrary to the scholastics, Clarke shows that Descartes argued against the scholastic model when Descartes argued that it was the unreliability of sense perception that allows for scientific knowledge. Because there is a difference between the content of our subjective sensations and the objective causes of the objects that produce our sensations, we cannot demonstrably argue from our descriptions of subjective sensations to descriptions of objective causes. Sensation thus yields contingent knowledge of physical phenomena, and the physical causes of our ideas are best explained with reference to hypothetical assumptions—hypotheses—about material causes and effects, represented by mechanical models, not resemblance assumptions about formal causes.
Clarke notes that Descartes’ hypotheses fundamentally alter how scientific knowledge is explained. First, because hypothetical demonstrations refer solely to the size, shape, and motion of the particles of material bodies; second, because Descartes thought that explanations of physical phenomena invoking the distinction between matter and form were vacuous, pseudo-explanations: reference to forms inhering in things neither accounts for the production of the phenomena to be explained, nor renders the phenomena capable of observation. While it may be true that a magnetic body attracts certain bodies because it has a “magnetic form”, the principle of substantial forms on which this account depends is itself in need of explanation. In contrast, Clarke notes that Descartes’ explanations are made plausible by analogically representing the microscopic particles of material phenomena with large-scale models, thus fundamentally altering the way in which science is practiced; for instance, unobservable light particles are represented with billiard ball size wooden spheres. Descartes adoption of hypotheses shifts the sense of demonstration to one of contingency in which scientific knowledge is something less than that of pure mathematics; hence a Cartesian explanation is a hypothesis that may be false or significantly inaccurate with reference to the phenomena it purports to explain. According to Clarke, the limitations of hypothetical explanations motivated Descartes to ground them in an indubitable metaphysical foundation.
Clarke notes that at this point in Descartes’ thinking about the relative certainty of scientific explanations he is unable to discard the conceptual categories of the scholastics. Scholastic knowledge claims admitted of two kinds: the demonstrably certain, and the uncertain, amounting to mere opinion. Because Descartes thought that hypotheses, while less than certain, were more plausible than uncertain opinion, he attempted to describe the relative accuracy with which models and hypotheses represent reality within the bounds of this scholastic dichotomy. Clarke thinks that Descartes’ efforts here are a doomed attempt to classify the relative probabilities of the method of hypothesis with the unsophisticated concepts of certainty and uncertainty available to him. Clarke claims that Descartes tries to subsume his hypothetical scientific reasoning to a few demonstrable metaphysical principles; but Clarke claims that Descartes fudges between some principles as certain and others as probable, revealing the ambivalence in Descartes’ philosophy of science. Clarke notes that despite Descartes’ efforts to ground natural science in metaphysical certainty, he was still left with many difficulties relating to complex experimentation, observation and interpretation dependence, and variable identification when modeling.
Cartesian science, Clarke insists, nonetheless, differs markedly from scholastic science despite sharing certain conceptual categories. Descartes was committed to hypothetical explanations, not certain demonstrations, referring solely to matter in motion, not occult properties.
[ I should like to retract some portion of my initial assessment. descartes was primarily a scientist, in the loose sense of the term, and less of a philosopher; least among his oeuvre is what might properly be considered philosophy. Thus i think it is perfectly appropriate for the essays to emphaze the scientific.:]
November 11, 2021
I have read three volumes of the Cambridge Companion series and have found them good for enhancing my armchair understanding of the philosopher I am currently interested in. Descartes’s thinking was not technically new, but it went against the grain in some good ways. These readable and balanced essays highlighted how this disposition enabled his contributions to philosophy.
Aside: The most interesting essay to me was the one on Descartes’ contribution to algebra. Descartes’ adopted way of thinking truly enabled him to see beyond the mathematics of his day. This essay alone is worth perusing if nothing else. In comparison, the Hobbes volume included an essay on his “influence” in mathematics, which was nil, honestly. The essay boiled down to “Hobbes was interested in mathematics and corresponded with several prominent mathematicians of his day. He may have secondarily inspired some of them by his questions and attempts.” It was interesting and may have been more appropriate in a general biography because Hobbes did have an interest in it, but I did not think the speculative nature was appropriate in a volume devoted to his actual contributions?
Aside: The most interesting essay to me was the one on Descartes’ contribution to algebra. Descartes’ adopted way of thinking truly enabled him to see beyond the mathematics of his day. This essay alone is worth perusing if nothing else. In comparison, the Hobbes volume included an essay on his “influence” in mathematics, which was nil, honestly. The essay boiled down to “Hobbes was interested in mathematics and corresponded with several prominent mathematicians of his day. He may have secondarily inspired some of them by his questions and attempts.” It was interesting and may have been more appropriate in a general biography because Hobbes did have an interest in it, but I did not think the speculative nature was appropriate in a volume devoted to his actual contributions?
November 8, 2014
Some detailed essays, but nothing new...there’s a whole essay just on the Cartesian circle.
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