This academic analysis of Descartes's (15961650) mathematical and philosophical studies traces the development of his work more than the patterns of his life and times. With an emphasis on reason over passions and the body that Descartes would no doubt have approved, Gaukroger (president of the Australian Society for the History of Philosophy) approaches him through his childhood education by Jesuits and his early experiments as a mathematician and natural philosopher rather than as the Enlightenment's ``Father of Modern Philosophy.'' The expanding cultural context of 17th-century Europe and a classical education drew Descartes's analytic and inquiring mind into the new scientific possibilities that were being pioneered by Galileo and Francis Bacon, and Gaukroger shows how Descartes's first work in geometry informed his desire for ``clear and self-evident distinctions'' in his later philosophy, as well as how his experiments in hydrostatics, optics, and anatomy supplied him with his models for general physics and perceptive cognition. Although rigorous in reviewing Descartes's various treatises, particularly the Regulae and Le Monde, and studious in rescuing his reasoning from the Newtonian and Lockean hindsight of later commentators, Gaukroger skims over his life far less illuminatingly, whether his effective exile in the Netherlands and Sweden, his close if sometimes touchy friendships with other philosophers, or his repressed and reclusive personal life. Even crucial events receive summary treatment, such as his famous three dreams that inspired his career (Gaukroger hypothesizes these occurred during a nervous breakdown) and his reaction to the Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo, which Gaukroger suggests turned him from his Copernican natural philosophy to a skeptically driven epistemological one that he could justify in relation to Church doctrinebut which would help to inspire the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Gaukroger's book lives up to its subtitle: It does valuable research in analyzing Descartes's work over his shifting career and in its proper context, but it wholly eclipses the biographic element. (67 figures, 4 halftones)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-823994-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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