The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of René Descartes

Shea, William R. 1991, x + 371 pp., illus.   Descartes is often described as the leading rationalist of the seventeenth century, an armchair philosopher who believed that his metaphysics contained all the principles of physics, and that physics was nothing but geometry. Such a simple characterization hardly does justice to a leading figure of the scientific revolution and conveys but a poor idea of the fascinating and complex way that his philosophy and his science interacted. This book provides a broader and fuller picture of a man of genius who lived in an age when a scholar could take the whole of knowledge for his province. In Chapters 1 and 2, we follow Descartes from his early training in a Jesuit college in France to the Netherlands where he enlisted in the army and was rescued from the boredom of the barrack life by Isaac Beechman, who stimulated his interest in mathematics, music, the law of free fall and problems in hydrostatics. In Chapter 2, we see how Descartes was launc