Descartes: The Life and times of a Genius
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.96 (666 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 080271501X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 368 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-12-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Intriguing thought that explains a lot This book brings up a very intersting set of connections that seem to explain a lot. True to program this book's focus is on biography instead of philosophy. But the biographical insights are well worth the read on their own. There is a good summary of Descartes' philosophical position in the first appendix. Paludanus said Boilerplate. Grayling's Descartes gives the conspicuous impression that it was written for a publisher who was looking to fill a gap in the market and took on the first academic who agreed to help out. The book relies heavily on other biographies, although it makes an attempt to be interesting/novel/sexy by suggesting t. thinking about the aftermath epic phlegm Hooha I appreciate the efforts of A. C. Grayling to produce a book, DESCARTES The Life and Times of a Genius (2005), which pictures how intellectual efforts produced many of the changes that we currently benefit from 400 years after the life of René Descartes (1596--1650). Being able to rely on a few clear
not seen by PW. All rights reserved. From Publishers Weekly A devout Catholic who lived in a time of "miracles, spontaneous generation, and phoenixes rising from the ashes," not to mention the Spanish Inquisition, Descartes (1596–1650) spent most of his life trying to justify to the church a rational approach to studying the natural world. 26 color and 11 b&w illus. Once Descartes leaves Paris for the Netherlands, a more crucial intellectual adventure begins in the conflict between his allegiance to the church and his "Copernican, materialist and mechanistic" scientific method. Unfortunately, this tension doesn't come across with the same vividness as in earlier chapters. Rather, this book of history illuminates the problems of an intellectual during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In the first half of the book, Grayling proposes that the you
But at his birth in 1596 the world was still dominated by medieval beliefs in phenomena such as miracles and spontaneous generation. C. His life coincided with an extraordinary time in history: the first half of the miraculous seventeenth century, replete with genius in the arts and sciences, and wracked by civil and international conflicts across Europe. Scientist, mathematician, traveler, soldierand spyRene Descartes was one of the founders of the modern world. It was Descartes who identified the intellectual tools his peers needed to free themselves from the grip of religious authority and in doing so he founded modern ph