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45. - Descartes, René (1596–1650)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

By
Alan Nelson
Edited by
Karolina Hübner  and
Justin Steinberg
Karolina Hübner
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Justin Steinberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

Descartes, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, was one of most influential thinkers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Born in France, Descartes produced his most famous works while living at various addresses in Holland. His opposition to traditional Aristotelian teachings met with official disapproval, but his work was widely read and discussed. Spinoza engaged in writing with Descartes’s thought more than he did with any other near contemporaries. The early TIE is similar in its overall plan to Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) and to the earlier, unpublished Rules for the Direction of the Native Intelligence which circulated widely and might have been read by Spinoza.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon , pp. 113 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Recommended Reading

Baier, A. (2014). The Meditations and Descartes’ considered conception of God. In Cunning, D. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Descartes’ Meditations (pp. 299–305). Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curley, E. M. (1988). Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, A. (1997). Descartes’s ontology of thought. Topoi, 16, 163–78.Google Scholar
Nelson, A.(2014). Descartes’ dualism and its relation to Spinoza’s metaphysics. In Cunning, D. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes’ Meditations (pp. 277–98). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shein, N. (2020). Spinning strands into aspects: Realism, idealism, and finite modes in Spinoza. European Journal of Philosophy, 28, 323–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, M. (1978). Descartes. Routledge.Google Scholar

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