Description

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A critical biography of René Descartes, whose first principle (“I think therefore I am.”) reshaped modern philosophy.
 
Often called the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes set the intellectual agenda for seventeenth-century philosophy, mathematics, natural science, and beyond. In this critical biography, based on compelling new research, Steven Nadler follows Descartes from his early education in France to the Dutch Republic, where he lived most of his adult life, to his final months as a tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden. Along the way, Nadler shows how Descartes renewed philosophy by transforming fundamental assumptions about the cosmos, natural world, and human nature as well as how his work continues to generate new insights into many of the metaphysical and epistemological problems that engage philosophers today.
 

About the Author

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Steven Nadler is a professor of philosophy and director of the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of numerous books, including Rembrandt's Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Praise For…

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"By firmly embedding his descriptions of Descartes’ achievements in their social, political, and sometimes personal settings, Nadler gives the reader a more fully human Descartes than is found in most introductions to his philosophy. The inclusion of several portraits of Descartes and his correspondents—most in color—enhance Nadler’s humanizing approach."
— Choice

"Steven Nadler’s outstanding biography achieves a fine balance of life, ideas and context, allowing Descartes’s philosophy to emerge from its eclectic seventeenth-century milieu in all its dazzling originality and strangeness. Lucid, compelling and unfailingly judicious, this is a marvelous new study of a magisterial modern thinker."
— Clare Carlisle Tresch, King’s College London