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Descartes: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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Those who have not yet studied Descartes will enjoy this clearly written introduction to Descartes' life and thought. However, even seasoned philosophy students are also liable to find much of interest in Sorell's DESCARTES. For most philosophy students, Descartes is more or less synonymous with the DISCOURSE ON METHOD and the MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY, and Descartes' scientific and mathematical work tend to be regarded as almost irrelevant and disconnected afterthoughts. The brilliance of Sorell's book is to show how Descartes' work constitutes an integrated whole, where the DISCOURSE and the MEDITATIONS are more a preliminary step in Descartes' project than the endpoint of his philosophy that we often take it to be.

This is an enjoyable and informative introduction to Descartes, his work, and his philosophy. Some may hesitate to delve into Descartes work because of its complexity and denseness of thought, but this "very short introduction" comes to the rescue, orienting us to Descartes' major ideas, their developmental history, and the context in which he developed them. The book is greatly interesting to read, and even the discourses on some of Descartes' more conceptual thought are treated with exceptional clarity. Although the book focuses on the developmental history of Descartes' investigation into the sciences (particularly in optics), the book also discusses his contributions to mathematical geometry, as well as some of his thoughts on faith and reason. If you are looking for an introduction to Descartes, it is hard to go wrong with this well-written and enjoyable pocket volume.

Descartes is one of the most influential Western philosophers, and this book is a useful first introduction to his life and ideas. The strength of the book is in positioning Descartes' writing primarily within the political and ideological currents of his time, and showing how exactly he's been forced to edit and finesse his writings in order to please the censorship and his critics. This helps explain why some of his works were not as straightforwardly written as one might have liked. The other reason has probably to do with the sheer ambition of Descartes' chief enterprise, to discover one sure method of arriving at explanations and solutions of the most pressing scientific and philosophical problems of the time. The enormity of this scope meant that some of these methods would necessarily be to vague to be of any practical use in mathematics or physics, and within a generation after Descartes' death Newtonian gravitation completely prevailed. However, in the realm of philosophy, Descarts' thought managed to be of interest until the present day.

This book is very well written, and if you are interested in finding out more about Descartes, it would be a worthwhile first read.

I previously had read Tom Sorrell's book on Hobbes and had very much enjoyed that. I learned a great deal from it and was impressed by its depth and range. I did not learn nearly as much from this book. It is not that the book is misconceived or poorly informed. It is simply not as well executed as his Hobbes book. It isn't a question of length. There is an absolutely outstanding introductory book on Descartes by John Cottingham, perhaps the top English language Descartes scholar of our time, Descartes, that is both enormously informative and exceptionally well written. I found this short book by Sorrell to be wide-ranging but opaque, and less illuminating on various ideas and concepts than I would have liked. If it weren't for the hefty price of the Cottingham book, I would strongly recommend it over this one.

The strong point of this book is that it takes a balanced approach to Descartes's philosophy. Many books on Descartes emphasize the philosophy over the scientific to such a degree that it drops out of consideration as an issue. Some undergraduates, having read the MEDITATIONS in a freshmen philosophy class, are unaware of Descartes's importance as a mathematician or physicist. Sorrell does an excellent job of placing all of Descartes's though within his scientific agenda. Descartes was not a philosopher who dabbled with science, but a scientific theoretician who was forced to metaphysical reflections. Though Sorrell is clear on noting that physicists and scientists did not exist as such; what we would call scientists were at the time known as natural philosophers. The problem with the book is not the breadth; that is actually its strength. The problem is the lack of clarity in the details. Too many concepts are mentioned in their contexts, without fully explaining that context. Because I've read a good deal on Descartes (actually, two graduate level courses on his work), I kept thinking that this was missing here or that lacking there.

The one thing that I found did regret in setting the overall context of Descartes work was the degree to which it was driven by theological concerns. Descartes was, as Sorrell points out, a critic of the Scholastic school that dominated Catholic education at the time. Descartes saw himself as opposing the Aristotelianism embedded in Scholastic (Thomist) thought by resurrecting Augustinian (hence, Platonic) thought. So when I say that Sorrell is good as setting the context of Descartes's thought, it was in terms of his scientific goals. Like many Decartes scholars, Sorrell neglects the theological side of his work, though it has been dealt with more thoroughly in the past couple of decades by several French and a few English-language scholars. Still, it is a book worth reading, though if you have the money or access via a library to the Cottingham book I noted above, I would recommend that instead.