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Descartes: An Intellectual Biography PDF

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Descartes This page intentionally left blank Descartes An Intellectua l Biograph y STEPHEN GAUKROGE R CLARENDON PRES S • OXFOR D 1995 This book Has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 GDP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford Ne w York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto with an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Stephen Gaukroger, 1995 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-823994-7 Jacket illustration: front; detail from the painting by Norman Carter, Descartes, Spinoza and Bacon, 1921. University of Sydney Collection. Back; Descartes as Faust. Frontispiece to Descartes, Opuscula Posthuma, Amsterdam, 1701 For my mother and fathe r Siobhan O'Connor and Herbert Wallace Sutcliffe Gaukroger This page intentionally left blank Preface Every great philosophy has so far been the self-confession o f its origi- nator, a kind of unintentional, unconscious memoires. (Nietzsche, jenseits von Gut und Bose) I have a vivid and happy memory of my first reading of Descartes, for it was with unbounded enthusias m that I devoured the Discourse o n Method, sitting in the shade of a tree in the Borghese Gardens in Rome in the summe r of 1970 , just before I started studyin g philosophy a t university. But I cannot honestl y say that my enthusiasm was fuelle d by my subsequent undergraduate courses on Descartes, which simply followed th e trad e winds , i n a n obsessiv e bu t completel y de - contextualized way, through the tired old questions of the cogito an d the foundations for knowledge. S o it was that my interest in the early seventeenth centur y cam e t o b e stimulate d b y Galile o rathe r tha n Descartes, and it was to Galileo that I devoted my main attention while a research student at Cambridge in the mid-1970s. While there, however, Gerd Buchdahl and John Schuster revealed to me a different Descartes, a more authentic and vastly more engaging one, whom I only began to explore properly ten years later. It is this Descartes who is the subject of this book, and I warn readers—if 'warn' is the right word, as some may breathe a sigh of relief—that i t is not th e Descartes from whom philosophers have made such a good living for decades that they will find here. But I have not simply set out to write the history of science or cultural history. Descartes is, after all, the figure who stands at the beginning of modern philosophy, just as Plato stands at the beginning of ancient philosophy. While I shall argue that his philosophical achieve- ments are much more intimately linked to his interest in what subse- quently have been considered 'scientific ' question s than i s commonly realized, my aim is not thereby to take Descartes out of the realm of philosophy, but rather to throw light on how he did philosophy. It is with some trepidation that I pursued this goal through the genre of intellectual biography, even though my own early interest in philo- sophy had bee n fired by Simone de Beauvoir's incomparable intellec- tual autobiography. People read intellectual biographies with differen t expectations, from the naive attempt to understand, at a distance as it were, ho w a 'grea t mind ' works , t o attempt s to mode l one' s ow n vii Preface thought and career on that of someone one admires. Perhaps the most famous example of modelling is Thomas Mann, who evidently tried to mirror in his own intellectual development the stages in Goethe's in - tellectual development, although I think there are very many less ex- plicit cases, and that biography generally has played an important role in 'self-fashioning' since the nineteenth century. This makes it a rather delicate genre, both from the point of the view of the reader and fro m that of the writer. Self-fashioning i s part of the rationale behind read- ing, and perhaps behind writing, intellectual biographies, but any self- fashioning will have to be very indirect in the present case. While the thesis of Jacques Le Goff, that modernity did not begin and the Middle Ages did not effectivel y ceas e until the French and Industrial Revolu- tions, is stronger than anything I would wish to argue in this book, I have no doubt that the culture in which Descartes lived and worked is much more remote from ou r own than is commonly recognized. This has consequences for biography, because a biography explores the emo- tional life of its subject, and the more removed from our own culture our subject is, the deeper the problems about how we are to succeed in this exploration. I have tried to be more responsive than my pred- ecessors to the difficulties tha t these issues raise, with the result that there is much greater concentration on the culture in which Descartes worked than one finds in earlier biographies. But I am also very con- scious of the problems of over-contextualization, and I have tried t o make sure that neither the subject of my biography, nor his contribu- tion, slips out o f focus. Anyone writing on Descartes cannot fail to acknowledge the excellent edition of Descartes' works by Adam and Tannery, which appeared in the first decade of this century, and more recently in a revised edition. I a m gratefu l als o t o Joh n Cottingham , Rober t Stoothoff , Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (3 vols., Cambridge, 1985-91), which has set the standards of clarity and accuracy in the English translation of Descartes. Although I have generally given my own translations, on a number of occasions I have found tha t I have not bee n able to improv e o n that o f Cottingha m et al., and have followed theirs. In the course of taking on the project, I have inevitably run up debts to too many people to acknowledge all those from whom I have learned. I have especially benefited from conversation and correspondence with Hans Aarslef, David Armstrong, Gordo n Baker , John Bigelow, Keith Campbell, Desmon d Clarke , John Cottingham , Ji m Franklin , Hele n Irving, Jamie Kassler, Tony Kenny, John Kilcullen, Katherine Morris, Lloyd Reinhardt, John Schuster, William Shea, Michael Shortland, John Sutton, an d Joh n Yolton . A n earlie r versio n of part s o f chapte r 4 vin preface appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 52 (1992); but as for my other writings on Descartes, I have changed my mind so signifi- cantly over the past two or three years that all of them are superseded by the present book. Part of the work was done while I was a visitor at Corpus Christ i College, Oxford, in the second half of 1991, and I would like to thank the University of Sydney for granting me study leave at this time, and the President and Fellows of Corpus Christ i for the facilities they of- fered me . Th e projec t ha s bee n helpe d alon g enormousl y b y thre e grants from the Australian Research Council, which assisted me in num- erous ways, including allowing me relief fro m teachin g in the second half o f 1993, when the book was completed in draft. S. G, Sydney 1994 . IX

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