Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes's Philosophy

摘要

Cottingham's familiarity with the Cartesian corpus enables him to argue forcefully against what he takes to be the distorting interpretive influences of contemporary analytic philosophy, contemporary secular thought, and an ecclesiastical establishment that has viewed Descartes with suspicion as the harbinger of trends both anticlerical and antireligious. After a helpful overview, the book divides into three parts: essays that situate Descartes within the broader philosophical landscape both historically and problematically, essays discussing Descartes's views on mind and body, and essays on ethics and religion including a timely discussion of the dialectical relationship in Descartes between the desire for technological control and the demands of a morality based on virtue and our response to truth and goodness.