René Descartes had a very short working life; the work he wrote was small in volume. And yet, the contributions that this work brought to the development of philosophy and science appear significant even to our days. It is very likely that his name became known thanks to the fame that his expression “Cogito, ergo sum” gained. Through the interweaving of “intuition” and “deduction” Descartes managed to see in the principle of “cogito” the existence of the material world. So, Descartes never sought to separate or avoid metaphysics from his scientific work, which itself included a series of important researches in the domains of nature, mathematics, psychology and optics.

In this book, Tom Sorrell shows how Descartes was first and foremost an outliner and promoter of a new approach to mathematics in the domain of nature, and how to support his program in the field of science, Descartes had to develop a completely original metaphysical vision.