Introduction: Descartes’s Method

Abstract

Extract From at least the mid-nineteenth century up to the 1970s, most historians of philosophy regarded Descartes’s method as the undisputed source of Cartesian science (including metaphysics). In 1826, Victor Cousin, who first translated Rules into French, described it as a treatise in which “one sees even more Descartes’s fundamental aim and the spirit of the revolution that created modern philosophy.”1 Cousin was not alone in his enthusiasm for Descartes’s method. “The Cartesian philosophy,” the French philosopher and Descartes scholar Louis Liard wrote in 1880, “is effectively the product, the commentary, and the justification of the method.”2 Eight years later, A. Boyce-Gibson, who first introduced Rules to Anglophone historians via a series of important articles, would similarly argue that “the Regulae undoubtedly remain the best exposition we have of that natural logic, under the guidance of which Descartes’s whole thought lived and moved.”3 Finally, in 1952, J. L. Beck, author of what remains one of the most extensive English-language commentaries on Rules to date, summed up his estimation of Descartes’s method in one sentence: “The Cartesian ‘revolution’ is primarily a revolution in method.”4 For these philosophers and scholars, there was simply no question: Descartes’s method is the source of Cartesian science. To understand the latter, one must understand the former.5