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Chapter One
Life and Works
STEPHEN GAUKROGER
In the seventeenth century, Descartes's reputation rested primarily first on his mathematics
and then on his cosmology. In the eighteenth century, it shifted gradually from
his cosmology to his mechanistic physiology, particularly his theory of "animal
machines." In the wake of Kant's fundamental rewriting of the nature of philosophy,
it was Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology that came to the fore in the nineteenth
century. In Anglophone philosophy in the twentieth century, the revival of interest in
empiricist epistemology, helped by the rise of positivism, resulted in skepticism being
taken much more seriously as a philosophical problem, and Descartes's skeptically
driven epistemology came to occupy the central ground. In French and German philosophy,
by contrast, interest centered from the 1930s onwards on the ethical and
political consequences of Descartes's idea of a self as independent of the world in which
it finds itself, as a locus of subjectivity that is given prior to any interactions that it has
with other subjects.
A ... read full excerpt from A Companion to Descartes ebook
