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POPSWhat Did Descartes Really Know? (Book Review) Great review of two new Descartes biographies that set some of the records straight on the great naturalist's works. Despite his current reputation, the man himself seems to have been less interested in metaphysics than in applying algebra to geometry and delving into the innards of cows. He turned to philosophy relatively late in life, and out of fear that the Catholic Church would condemn his science. He would have been surprised at how he is remembered. Most of all, he would have been aghast at the way in which “I think, therefore I am” has been ripped from its context, inflated into a one-sentence summary of his ideas, and turned into something absurd. The rot set in at the start of the nineteenth century, when Hegel made heavy weather of “I think, therefore I am” and took it to mean that thought and being are fundamentally the same thing.
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