Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes - Hardcover

Watson, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567921841 ISBN 13: 9781567921847

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Watson was a professor of philosophy and a pre-eminent Cartesian scholar.

Reviews

Probably the strangest biography of the year, this volume is the product of more than forty years of obsession by Watson, a professor of philosophy at Washington University, in St. Louis. He is less interested in the revered philosopher and mathematician than in the diminutive, arrogant Frenchman who fathered a child out of wedlock, probably dabbled in drugs, and practiced vivisection on animals (which Descartes considered machines without souls). Unearthing the real Descartes took some spadework—much of the misinformation about him was popularized by the famous 1691 biography by Adrien Baillet—and Watson isn't shy about playing up his own achievements as a researcher. This excessively colloquial, willfully eccentric book is as infuriating as it is entertaining, right down to the index, which includes such entries as "Pop a pill, 326" (this particular citation points to an aside of Watson's about how modern readers deal with anxiety).
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Watson, veteran professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, specializes in books of horse sense that reflect a lifelong study of the philosophical greats; titles include The Philosopher's Diet, The Philosopher's Joke and The Philosopher's Demise. Watson's prose persona is the canny old uncle (or college lecturer), making distant and abstract history seem homey and accessible, yet with a light sense of humor that forestalls any potential charge of lowbrow philistinism. He here covers the diverse realms in which Descartes's thought takes place, from metaphysics to mathematics (where he invented analytic geometry), optics, medicine, physiology and psychology. The book is billed as the first since 1920 to contain original documentary research, as Watson combed libraries and European sites where Descartes lived. He typically relates Descartes's movements, such as going to Sweden to work for Queen Christina, with cracker-barrel philosophy: "Descartes was, I speculated, like a professor in the sticks, teaching at Podunk U., waiting for the fabled call from Harvard... But compared to the French court, Stockholm... was in the minor leagues not Harvard Ohio State maybe." In 13 chapters and a conclusion, with titles like "Descartes's Dog" and "Magic Kingdoms," the philosopher's story is recounted in readable prose, too folksy to be called academic, but not dumbed-down either. Readers with a passing interest will be satisfied and entertained.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Watson (philosophy, Washington Univ., St. Louis) has produced the third major biography of Descartes to be published in the past few years, and he carefully distinguishes his work from the other two. He notes that while Genevieve Rodis-Lewis's Descartes: A Biography portrays Descartes primarily as a believer whose work supports Christian theology, Stephen Gaukroger's Descartes: An Intellectual Biography limns Descartes as "the Great Scientist." Watson avoids both orientations, instead aiming to offer "a skeptical biography, as full of doubt about tradition and authority as was Descartes himself" and "the only one ever written for general readers." In this he has succeeded admirably. The narrative in which Watson injects his own persona and experiences tracing Descartes throughout Europe is both rigorous and engrossing, and readers will see clearly how pertinent the 17th-century Descartes is to the modern world. This book belongs in all philosophy and biography collections. Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, DC
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* In four decades of probing, Watson has uncovered more than a few piquant secrets in the life of Rene Descartes--here shared with a marvelous and endearing irreverence. In the first biography of the thinker ever written for general readers, Watson recovers the life of a man too irascible and high-spirited to fit within academe's sanitized iconography. To be sure, the Descartes we meet in these pages has rightfully earned his place in the pantheon through rare feats in mathematics, psychology, and philosophy. But the keepers of the pantheon have somehow neglected to let the public know about the episodes Watson recounts with relish: how a mathematical genius smoked pot, gambled at cards, and slept in the nude; how an intellectual giant fathered a child out of wedlock and entangled himself in the defense of a murderer. To ferret out such episodes, while discrediting the pious myths that have long hidden them, Watson has retraced Descartes' circuitous path through much of Europe, and no false modesty keeps him from weaving his own story of tireless travel and shrewd sleuthing into this richly textured tale. Yet for all of his puckish delight in a juicy anecdote, Watson recognizes and carefully explicates the cultural centrality of Descartes' intellectual legacy. That legacy ensures numerous readers sure to praise a biographer who delivers both the philosopher's cerebral doctrines and his unmistakably human conduct. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1567921841
• ISBN 13: 9781567921847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 375