Descartes

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his books include Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (2020).

Descartes: The Renewal of Philosophy is a masterly account of one of the best-known figures of modern philosophy. Steven Nadler shows us the steps in the expressions of Descartes’ ideas as they emerged during a life itself in rapid motion: from the young gentleman’s French education, to his travels throughout Europe in the midst of the Thirty Years War, to his self-imposed exile in the Dutch Republic where he wrote and published, to his death at the court of Queen Christina in Sweden. Along the way, Nadler lets us see not only Descartes’ views but the nature of the threats he posed for Scholastically inclined theologians of his day. A clear, distinct, and lively guide. - Harold J. Cook, John F. Nickoll Professor of History, Brown University, and author of The Young DescartesSteven Nadler’s outstanding biography achieves a fine balance of life, ideas and context, allowing Descartes’s philosophy to emerge from its eclectic seventeenth-century milieu in all its dazzling originality and strangeness. Lucid, compelling and unfailingly judicious, this is a marvellous new study of a magisterial modern thinker. - Clare Carlisle Tresch, Professor of Philosophy, King’s College London