Descartes explains that he is describing not how the world was actually made, but how God might have made it otherwise, if he had so pleased.. Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Eli
Trang 1evolutionary Descartes explains that he is describing not how the world was actually made, but how God might have made it otherwise, if he had so pleased
Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elizabeth led him to reXect further on the relationship between the body and the soul, and to construct an ethical system resembling ancient Stoicism He developed these reXections into The Passions of the Soul When the treatise was published, however, it was dedicated not to Elizabeth, but to another royal lady who had interested herself in philosophy, Queen Christina of Sweden The queen was so impressed that she invited Descartes to be her court phil-osopher, sending an admiral with a battleship to fetch him from Holland Descartes was reluctant to sacriWce his solitude and the appointment proved disastrous He felt lonely and out of place: he was employed in writing a ballet and forced to rise at 5 a.m to instruct the queen in philosophy
Descartes had immense conWdence in his own abilities, and still more in the method he had discovered Given a few more years of life, he thought, and given suYcient research funding, he would be able to solve all the outstanding problems of physiology and learn thereby the cures of all diseases At this point he fell a victim to the rigours of the Swedish winter While nursing a sick friend he caught pneumonia, and died on 11 February
1650 There was an ironic Wttingness about the motto which he had chosen for himself as an epitaph:
No man is harmed by death, save he Who, known too well by all the world, Has not yet learnt to know himself.
Descartes was a man of extraordinary and versatile genius His ideas on physiology, physics, and astronomy were superseded within a century: they enjoyed a much shorter currency than the Aristotelian system they were designed to replace But his work in algebra and geometry entered into the abiding patrimony of mathematics; and his philosophical ideas remain—for better or worse—enormously inXuential to the present day No one can question his claim to rank among the greatest philosophers of all time
We should not, however, take him altogether at his own valuation In the Discourse he insists that systems created by an individual are to be preferred to those created by communities:
D E S C A R T E S T O B E R K E L E Y
39