Descartes intellectual biography
- This intellectual biography offers a detailed exposition on the intellectual development and evolution of thought of René Descartes.
- This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English; it offers a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work.
- Descartes is one of the greatest of all thinkers.
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GREAT THINKERS René Descartes
Stephen Gaukroger. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Clarendon Press. 1995. 520pp.
From the publisher:
René Descartes’s insights into the nature of knowledge and the mind have inspired awe and debate through the centuries. But while philosophers have sought to understand the ramifications of his theories, they have paid much less attention to how, exactly, he arrived at his ideas. What twists and turns of his intellect brought him to his epochal conclusions? How did his personal ambitions and the social conditions of his era shape his thought? These questions and more are masterfully answered in Stephen Gaukroger’s Descartes, a fascinating look at this most influential of all Renaissance thinkers.
In his quest to retrace Descartes’s development as a scientist and philosopher, Gaukroger leaves no stone unturned. From the great man’s first book on music theory (Compendium Musicae) to his masterworks Discours, Essais, Meditationes, and Principia, from his study of mathematics while atten
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René Descartes
1. Intellectual Biography
1.1 Early life and education
Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 in his maternal grandmother’s house in La Haye, in the Touraine region of France. His father Joachim, a lawyer who lived in Châtellerault (22 kilometers southwest of La Haye, across the Creuse River in the Poitou region), was away at the Parliament of Brittany in Rennes. The town of La Haye, which lies 47 kilometers south of Tours, has subsequently been renamed Descartes.
When Descartes was thirteen and one-half months old, his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died in childbirth. The young René spent his early years with his grandmother, Jeanne Sain Brochard, in La Haye, together with his older brother Pierre and older sister Jeanne. It is likely that he then moved to the house of his great uncle, Michel Ferrand, who, like many of René’s male relatives, was a lawyer; he was a Counselor to the King and held the royal office of provincial Lieutenant General in Châtellerault. When Descartes met Isaac Beeckman in 1618, he introduced himse
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Descartes: An Intellectual Biography
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