Descartes: The Story of a Mind

Descartes: The Story of a Mind offers a rigorous, historically grounded reappraisal of René Descartes’s intellectual development. Rejecting fixed labels and anachronistic formulae, Mori portrays a thinker in motion—shaped by uncertainty, dialogue, and evolving contexts. Drawing on lesser-known texts, correspondences, and polemics, the book foregrounds the fragmentary, dialectical nature of Descartes’s philosophy. From early influences to the unity expressed in the tree of knowledge, the book reconstructs a dynamic Cartesian trajectory that bridges metaphysics, science, and ethics, revealing a mind perpetually negotiating its boundaries amid the shifting debates of the seventeenth century.