Exactly four hundred years after the birth of René Descartes (1596-1650), the present volume now makes available, for the first time in a bilingual, philosophical edition prepared especially for English-speaking readers, his Regulae ad directionem ingenii / Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence (1619-1628), the Cartesian treatise on method. This unique edition contains an improved version of the original Latin text, a new English translation intended to be as literal as possible and as liberal as necessary, an interpretive essay contextualizing the text historically, philologically, and philosophically, a com-prehensive index of Latin terms, a key glossary of English equivalents, and an extensive bibliography covering all aspects of Descartes' methodology. Stephen Gaukroger has shown, in his authoritative Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), that one cannot understand Descartes without understanding the early Descartes. But one also cannot understand the early Descartes without understanding the Regulae / Rules. Nor can one understand the Regulae / Rules without understanding a philosophical edition thereof. Therein lies the justification for this project. The edition is intended, not only for students and teachers of philosophy as well as of related disciplines such as literary and cultural criticism, but also for anyone interested in seriously reflecting on the nature, expression, and exercise of human intelligence: What is it? How does it manifest itself? How does it function? How can one make the most of what one has of it? Is it equally distributed in all human beings? What is natural about it, and what, not? In the Regulae / Rules Descartes tries to provide, from a distinctively early modern perspective, answers both to these and to many other questions about what he refers to as ingenium.

Exactly four hundred years after the birth of René Descartes (1596-1650), the present volume now makes available, for the first time in a bilingual, philosophical edition prepared especially for English-speaking readers, his Regulae ad directionem ingenii / Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence (1619-1628), the Cartesian treatise on method. This unique edition contains an improved version of the original Latin text, a new English translation intended to be as literal as possible and as liberal as necessary, an interpretive essay contextualizing the text historically, philologically, and philosophically, a com-prehensive index of Latin terms, a key glossary of English equivalents, and an extensive bibliography covering all aspects of Descartes' methodology. Stephen Gaukroger has shown, in his authoritative Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), that one cannot understand Descartes without understanding the early Descartes. But one also cannot understand the early Descartes without understanding the Regulae / Rules. Nor can one understand the Regulae / Rules without understanding a philosophical edition thereof. Therein lies the justification for this project. The edition is intended, not only for students and teachers of philosophy as well as of related disciplines such as literary and cultural criticism, but also for anyone interested in seriously reflecting on the nature, expression, and exercise of human intelligence: What is it? How does it manifest itself? How does it function? How can one make the most of what one has of it? Is it equally distributed in all human beings? What is natural about it, and what, not? In the Regulae / Rules Descartes tries to provide, from a distinctively early modern perspective, answers both to these and to many other questions about what he refers to as ingenium.

L'idee d'entreprendre une edition critique des Regulce ad direction em ingenii s'est imposee a nous pendant que nous pre parions un commentaire de ce traite inacheve de Descartes. Le texte etabli par Ch. Adam nous a, plus d'une fois, inspire certains doutes, qui nous invitaient a verifier les sources. C'est ainsi que nous avons ete amene a prendre en consideration la version hollandaise du XVIIe siecle, que 1'editeur de Descartes avait completement negligee. La collation du manuscrit de Hanovre avec l' editio princeps d' Amsterdam et l' examen de la version hollandaise nous ont permis de faire des retouches, quelquefois importantes, a 1'edition Adam. N ous tenons a remercier de leurs precieux conseils les Profes seurs Dr. E. W. Beth, Dr. E. Garin, Dr. F. L. R. Sassen, Ie Dr. F. Veenstra, et tout particulierement Ie Prof. Dr. P. Dibon, dont I'infatigable assistance nous a ete tres precieuse surtout dans la derniere phase de nos travaux. Nous sommes, en outre, tres reconnaissant a M. Ie Directeur de la Niedersachsische Lan desbibliothek de Hanovre pour Ie manuscrit qu'il a mis a notre disposition, et a M. Ie Directeur de l'Universiteitsbibliotheek d' Amsterdam pour l' exemplaire de la version hollandaise dont il nous a permis de publier Ie texte. Nous devons a Madame F. van Rossum-Guyon d'avoir rendu possible la traduction en franc;ais.

René Descartes (1596-1650) is the father of modern philosophy, and one of the greatest of all thinkers. This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English; it offers a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work. Stephen Gaukroger, a leading authority on Descartes, traces his intellectual development from childhood, showing the connections between his intellectual and personal life and placing these in the cultural context of seventeenth century Europe. Descartes' early work in mathematics and science produced ground breaking theories, methods, and tools still in use today. This book gives the first full account of how this work informed and influenced the later philosophical studies for which, above all, Descartes is renowned. Not only were philosophy and science intertwined in Descartes' life; so were philosophy and religion. The Church of Rome found Galileo guilty of heresy in 1633; two decades earlier, Copernicus' theories about the universe had been denounced as blasphemous. To avoid such accusations, Descartes clothed his views about the relation between God and humanity, and about the nature of the universe, in a philosophical garb acceptable to the Church. His most famous project was the exploration of the foundations of human knowledge, starting from the proof of one's own existence offered in the formula Cogito ergo sum, `I am thinking therefore I exist'. Stephen Gaukroger argues that this was not intended as an exercise in philosophical scepticism, but rather to provide Descartes' scientific theories, influenced as they were by Copernicus and Galileo, with metaphysical legitimation. This book offers for the first time a full understanding of how Descartes developed his revolutionary ideas. It will be welcomed by all readers interested in the origins of modern thought.

"Descartes and the 'Ingenium' tracks the significance of embodied thought (ingenium) in the philosophical trajectory of the founding father of dualism. The first part defines the notion of ingenium in relation to core concepts of Descartes's philosophy, such as memory and enumeration. It focuses on Descartes's uses of this notion in methodical thinking, mathematics, and medicine. The studies in the second part place the Cartesian ingenium within preceding scholastic and humanist pedagogical and natural-philosophical traditions, and highlight its hitherto ignored social and political significance for Descartes himself as a member of the Republic of Letters. By embedding Descartes' notion of ingenium in contemporaneous medical, pedagogical, but also social and literary discourses, this volume outlines the fundamentally anthropological and ethical underpinnings of Descartes's revolutionary epistemology"--

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