An intellectual biography
Intellectual biography sample...
GREAT THINKERS René Descartes
Stephen Gaukroger. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography.
How to write 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?
An intellectual biography
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 masterwo