Descartes Philosophy In An Hour

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Descartes in just one hour.

Rene Descartes spent much of his life in solitude. Fortunately, these countless lonely hours helped Descartes produce the declaration that changed all philosophy: "I think, therefore I am." Convincing himself to doubt and disregard sensory knowledge, Descartes found he could prove his existence through his thoughts alone. This internal reality, he believed, was the true reality, while the external was hopelessly deceiving. In Descartes in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Descartes's life and ideas and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Descartes's work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Descartes within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

Key Texts are facsimile paperback editions of books which have not been available for many years.

One of the most significant studies of Descartes in recent times. It concentrates on the Meditations to show Descartes' philosophy in the context of his overall scientific objectives, not all of them fully explicit in the texts.

Descartes' ideas not only changed the course of Western philosophy but also led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics and mathematics, political theory and ethics, psychoanalysis, and literature and the arts. This book reprints Descartes' major works, Discourse on Method and Meditations, and presents essays by leading scholars that explore his contributions in each of those fields and place his ideas in the context of his time and our own. There are chapters by David Weissman on metaphysics and psychoanalysis, John Post on epistemology, Lou Massa on physics and mathematics, William T. Bluhm on politics and ethics, and Thomas Pavel on literature and art. These essays are accompanied by others by David Weissman and by Stephen Toulmin that introduce the idea of intellectual lineages, discuss the period in which Descartes wrote, and reexamine the premises of his philosophy in light of contemporary philosophical, political, and social thinking.

First Published in 1999. The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance. In this volume, the author offers what she believes to be a somewhat different over-all reading of Descartes’ philosophy, and particularly of the Meditations, from other commentators—especially those written in English.