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Author Shorto, Russell.

Title Descartes' bones : a skeletal history of the conflict between faith and reason / Russell Shorto.

Publication Info. New York : Doubleday, [2008]
©2008

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Avon Free Public Library - Adult Department  194 SHORTO    Check Shelf
 Burlington Public Library - Adult Department  194 SHO    Check Shelf
 Enfield, Main Library - Adult Department  194 SHO    Check Shelf
 Glastonbury, Welles-Turner Memorial Library - Adult Department  194 SHORTO    Check Shelf
 Granby, Main Library - Adult  194 SHO    Check Shelf
 Middletown, Russell Library - Adult Nonfiction  194 SHO    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  194 D45D    Check Shelf
 South Windsor Public Library - Non Fiction  194 SHORTO    Check Shelf
 Windsor, Main Library - Adult Department  194 SH    Check Shelf
Edition First edition.
Description xx, 299 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [261]-287) and index.
Contents The man who died -- Banquet of bones -- Unholy relics -- The misplaced head -- Cranial capacity -- Habeas corpus -- A modern face.
Summary On a brutal winter's day in 1650 in Stockholm, the Frenchman René Descartes, the most influential and controversial thinker of his time, was buried after a cold and lonely death far from home. Sixteen years later, the French Ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthed Descartes' bones and transported them to France. Why would this devoutly Catholic official care so much about the remains of a philosopher who was hounded from country to country on charges of atheism? Why would Descartes' bones take such a strange, serpentine path over the next 350 years--a path intersecting some of the grandest events imaginable: the birth of science, the rise of democracy, the mind-body problem, the conflict between faith and reason? Descartes? Bones is a historical detective story about the creation of the modern mind, with twists and turns leading up to the present day?to the science museum in Paris where the philosopher?s skull now resides and to the church a few kilometers away where, not long ago, a philosopher-priest said a mass for his bones.
Subject Descartes, René, 1596-1650.
Faith.
Reason.
ISBN 9780385517539
038551753X
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