Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 303 of Ghent could not be more illuminating (no pun intended). No reader will leave this chapter unappreciative of what is at stake in the epistemological disputations of late Medieval thought or of the historic role that Scotus played in them. I would conclude by noting that works such as this are particularly important in the field of medieval philosophy. Its at times arcane vocabulary and interests have led even some historians of philosophy to the wishful thinking that one can leap from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, after, perhaps, an obligatory mention of Augustine and Aquinas; as if the Middle Ages were irrelevant to what came after, namely, to modernism , let alone to postmodernism. The task of clarifying the necessary connections that have to be made to medieval thought, not only in the transition to thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza, but in the specific connection, for example, of Heidegger to Scotus and, even more specifically, to his doctrine of transcendentals, is immensely aided by such an accessible book about such a difficult author. That wc might all read and teach Scotus without being specialists in the field is a prospect that Frank and Wolter have greatly enhanced. GREGORY SCHUFREIDER Louisiana State University Stephen Gaukroger. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xx + 499. Cloth, $35.oo. Any book on Descartes promising "a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work" (my emphasis)--as Gaukroger's Descartes does on the dust cover--has a huge pair of intellectual shoes to fill, for Descartes was not merely a philosopher, but a scientist (to use a distinction which it is somewhat anachronistic to apply to the seventeenth century) and mathematician, making original and pivotal contributions in metaphysics , epistemology, ethics, geometry, algebra, physics, meteorology, cosmology, optics , physiology, anatomy, medicine, music, and many other subjects. That Descartes was not merely a philosopher but a scientist as well is the nub of Gaukroger's supposedly revisionist project. He proposes to offer us a different Descartes from "the Descartes from whom philosophers have made such a good living for decades," without simply writing "the history of science or cultural history." Yet his aim "is not thereby to take Descartes out of the realm of philosophy, but rather to throw light on how he did philosophy." The reality, however, is that Gaukroger finds this aim very difficult to achieve. His portrait of Descartes is predominantly that of a scientist and incidentally that of a philosopher. The book contains ten chapters which divide up Descartes's life. They cover his childhood and cultural background (1596-16o6), La Fl~che (16o6-18), Beeckman (1619--19), method 06a9-25), Paris (a625-28), scientific problems (16~9-3o), Le Monde 063o-33), first published works 0634-4o), natural philosophy (a643-44), and the passions (1643-5o). There is also an appendix of biographical sketches (mainly of Descartes's contemporaries), a select bibliography, and an analytical index. Gaukroger's expertise in Cartesian logic, mathematics, and natural philosophy 304 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL 1997 tends to pull him away from the goal of providing a balanced account of Descartes's philosophy as a whole. For example, in giving us an account of Descartes's mastery of the mesolabe compass (used to calculate mean proportionals), the Pappus problem, algebra, hydrostatics, parhelia (the appearance of bright spots of light on the ring of the sun's halo), the law of refraction, the anaclastic (the problem in optics of describing the path from which parallel rays of light are deflected when they hit a denser medium ), falling bodies, and magnetism, to name but the principal ones, Gaukroger in each case goes into the most minute detail. I hope I am mistaken in thinking that many readers will find these accounts not just austere but sprawling and philosophically garrulous. When Gaukroger is not grinding Cartesian scientific axes, he is sometimes involved in sheer armchair speculation. For example, he tells us that at the time when Descartes had his often-cited dreams, "he probably had a nervous breakdown" (xv). Moreover, he accuses Descartes of lying about the date of his mother's death (16-17). Elsewhere he...