Descartes: The World and Other Writings

Descartes’ The World offers the most comprehensive vision of the nature of the world since Aristotle, and is crucial for an understanding of his later writings, in particular the Meditations and Principles of Philosophy. Above all, it provides an insight into how Descartes conceived of natural philosophy before he started to reformulate his doctrines in terms of a sceptically driven epistemology. Of its two parts, the Treatise on Light introduced the first comprehensive, quantitative version of a mechanistic natural philosophy, supplying a theory of matter, a physical optics, and a cosmology. The Treatise on Man provided the first comprehensive mechanist physiology. This volume also includes translations of material important for an understanding of the work: related sections from the Dioptrics and the Meteors, and an English translation of the complete text of The Description of the Human Body.

• Important text for understanding Descartes’ later major works • Provides an alternative translation • Useful introduction, chronology and notes on further reading

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chronology; Further reading; Note on the texts; The World and other writings: 1. The Treatise on Light; 2. Discourse 2 of the Dioptrics; 3. Discourse 8 of the Meteors; 4. The Treatise on Man; 5. Description of the Human Body; Index.