Descartes René - Descartes: A Guide for the Perplexed

Continuums Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, Alex Thomson

Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed, Claire Colebrook

Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed, Julian Wolfreys

Descartes: A Guide for the Perplexed, Justin Skirry

Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen Earnshaw

Freud: A Guide for the Perplexed, Celine Surprenant

Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed, Chris Lawn

Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed, Eduardo Mendieta

Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed, David James

Hobbes: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen J. Finn

Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed, Angela Coventry

Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matheson Russell

Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed, TK Seung

Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed, Clare Carlisle

Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, B. C. Hutchens

Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed, Franklin Perkins

Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed, Eric Matthews

Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed, R. Kevin Hill

Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gerald A. Press

Quine: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Kemp

Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed, David Pellauer

Rousseau: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matthew Simpson

Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Cox

Spinoza: A Guide for the Perplexed, Charles Jarrett

Wittgenstein: A Guide for the Perplexed, Mark Addis

Continuum International Publishing Group

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Justin Skirry 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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system, without prior permission from the publishers.

First published 2008

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-8985-0

PB: 0-8264-8986-9

ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-8985-2

PB: 978-0-8264-8986-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Skirry, Justin.

Descartes : a guide for the perplexed / Justin Skirry.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8264-8985-2 - ISBN 978-0-8264-8986-9

1. Descartes, Ren, 1596-1650. I. Title.

B1873.S55 2008

194-dc22

2007027773

First and foremost I would like to thank the editors at Continuum for their understanding and support in completing this project. I would also like to thank all those at the Cochrane-Woods Library of Nebraska Wesleyan University for their tireless efforts and dedicated service. Finally, I would like to thank my research assistant Kiran Bhardwaj for her fresh eye and insightful comments and criticisms.

For my wife

Sarah Jane

Ren Descartes was born to Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard on 31 March 1596 in La Haye, near Tours, France. The Descartes clan was a bourgeois family composed of mostly doctors and some lawyers. Joachim Descartes was a lawyer who spent most of his career as a member of provincial French parliaments. After the death of their mother, which occurred soon after Rens birth, the Descartes children (Ren, his sister Jeanne and brother Pierre) were sent to live with their maternal grandmother, Jeanne Sain. They remained with her until their father remarried in 1600. Not much is known about his early childhood, but Ren is thought to have been a sickly and fragile child, so much so that when he was sent to board at the Jesuit college at La Flche at Easter 1607, he was not obligated to rise at 5:00am with the other boys for morning prayers but was allowed to rest until 10:00am Mass. At La Flche Descartes completed the usual courses of study as well as the philosophical curriculum with courses in the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic (or logic) and the mathematical arts which comprised arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. His course of study at the college was capped off with courses in metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics. Descartes graduated from La Flche in 1614.

In 1615-16 Descartes received a degree in civil and canon law from the University of Poitiers. However, despite his degree, he never pursued a law career. Instead, he chose to see the world as a volunteer in the army of Maurice of Nassau. It is during this time that he met Isaac Beekman, who was perhaps the most important influence on his early adulthood. It was Beekman who rekindled Descartes interest in science and opened his eyes to the possibility of applying mathematical techniques to other fields. Descartes, however, remained a soldier and was stationed at Ulm in Germany where he had three dreams that gave him a vision of a universal science and inspired a search for a new method. Descartes began his work on a method entitled Rules for the Direction of the Mind at about this time, sporadically working on it from about 1620 until finally abandoning the project for good in 1628.

It was also in 1628 that Descartes moved to the Netherlands. He remained there, despite frequent changes of address, until he moved to Sweden at the invitation of Queen Christina in late 1649. He moved to the Netherlands to achieve a solitude and quiet that he could not attain with all the distractions of Paris. It was here in 1629 that Descartes began work on The World, which was intended to provide a mechanistic picture of the world. But the condemnation of Galileo led him to suppress its publication (see Chapter 6.1 for more). Although many of its principles and explanations were published in later works, The World itself never saw the light of day. However, this did not deter him from his own scientific enquiries or from providing mechanistic explanations for a wide variety of phenomena. Some of these findings were published in French in 1637 in the form of three essays entitled Geometry, Dioptics and Meteors, which had a preface attached to them entitled Discourse on Method.