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 |
|