Rene Descartes

Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of religious scandal: and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius, in searching for new proofs of the existence of a God, was suspected to believe there was no such Being. --Voltaire, On Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton, Letters on the English (Lettres Philosophiques) by Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Harvard Classics (1909–14), Vol. 34, Part 2, Bartleby


On this author:

Descartes’s chief contribution to modern science and philosophy was his radical focus on epistemology, on defining the boundaries of what we are capable of knowing with certainty. At the center of this project was his assertion of mind-body dualism... --Gary Rosen, Body of Knowledge, The New York Times, October 31, 2008, review of Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, by Russell Shorto

Think Again: What did Descartes really know? by Anthony Gottlieb, The New Yorker, November 20, 2006

Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics, by Quentin Taylor, Humanitas 2001 No. 2

A funny-peculiar mind-body picture: Steven Shapin delves into the intellectual, as well as the rather more material, concerns of Rene Descartes, review of Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes, by Richard A Watson, London Review of Books, January 20, 2003

Therefore I am, by Heller McAlpin, review of Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes, by Richard Watson, Christian Science Monitor, June 6, 2002