Review

"Gaukroger's book is not so much a personal portrait of Descartes as it is an extraordinary perambulation around the spiritual and intellectual life of the seventeenth century. It tells the tale of Descartes's recasting of the concerns of his contemporaries into a world that we find utterly familiar.... An extraordinary book. It is a never-ending source of astonishment that Descartes can still be so absolutely strange and so absolutely familiar.... Gaukroger has united the strange and the familiar in Descartes, teaching us something fundamental about the early conception of our world."--The New Republic

"Stephen Gaukroger's demanding intellectual biography explores every aspect of Descartes...and does so with considerable acumen and great scholarly thoroughness."--The Washington Post

From the Back Cover

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is the father of modern philosophy, and one of the greatest of all thinkers. This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English; it offers a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work.

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