‘Descartes in 90 Minutes’ by Paul Strathern is an very very short introduction to Descartes. This book is a very easy, short, brief and amusing guide book to Descartes. The main content ‘Descartes’s Life & Works’ is a biographical description of Descartes’s life along with works and thoughts. It includes Descartes’s divided characteristics of ‘solitude and travel’, his personal and philosophical inclination, health weakness and refined fashion. And Strathern explains philosophical background of the era (influences of Scholasticism, Catholicism and Renaissance). Then he writes how Descartes changed and advanced the philosophical and scientific view in the Europe. ‘Afterword’ describes influences of, criticism to, failure of Descartes’s philosophy, especially his dichotomy of mind and matter, and mechanical view of universe. Even today, his argument and thinking are important and controversial in philosophy and science.
This book is an excellent interesting digest of Descartes’s total biography, but disappointingly philosophical commentary is few. But there are some right to point commentaries to Descartes’s philosophy. I’ll quote one of them. Descartes ‘had conceived of a universal science capable of embracing all human knowledge. This would arrive at truth by the use of reason. But this was much more than just a revolutionary new method. — Descartes had conceived of a system that would not only include all knowledge but also unite it. This system would be based on certainly alone. It would start from basic principles, which were themselves self-evident, and would build from there.’
Descartes in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)
Paul Strathern
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, September 1 1996
91 pages $7.95
ISBN: 978-1-56663-129-7
Contents:
Introduction
Descartes’s Life and Works
Afterword
From Descartes’s Writing
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Chronology of Descartes’s Life
Chronology of Descartes’s Era
Recommended Reading
Index