Descartes: The lost episodes

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 437-460

  MacDonald, Paul S ^a  

^a MURDOCH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949577072     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2002.0071     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Gregor Sebba, "Baillet's Life of Descartes," in Problems of Cartesianism, T. M. Lennon et al., eds. (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1982), 48-60.
2. G. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought, Jane Marie Todd, trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), xiii-xiv.
3. For a very detailed description of Prague Castle, building by building, and floor by floor, see Erhard Gorys, Czecho-Slovakia (London: Pallas-Athene, 1991), 83-124.
4. See Eliska Fuchikova et al., eds., Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), viii-ix.
5. Adrien Baillet, La Vie de M. Descartes (Paris, 1691), facsimile reprint, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Garland, 1970), vol. 1, 70-80.
6. Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold (Penguin Books, 1997), 227;
7. Patrick Fermor, A Time of Gifts (Penguin Books, 1979), 246;
8. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 114-6.
9. Angelo Ripellino, Magical Prague, David Marinelli, trans. (London: Picador Books, 1995);
10. R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997);
11. see also Josef Petran and Lydia Petranova, "The White Mountain as a symbol in modern Czech history," in Bohemia in History, Mikulas Teich, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143-63.
12. Rodis-Lewis, op. cit., 50-2;
13. Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 126.
14. J.-R. Armogathe et al., "La Licence en droit de Descartes: un placard inedit de 1616," Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres 8 (1988): 123-45.
15. Among others, in minute detail by Henri Gouhier, Les Premieres Pensées de Descartes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1979), 82-5, 104-10;
16. Rodis-Lewis, op. cit., 49-58.
17. Gaukroger, op. cit., 126;
18. Demetz, op. cit., 225-30.
19. William Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion (Washington, D.C.: Science History, 1991), 105.
20. Gouhier, op. cit., 11-8.
21. Rodis-Lewis, op. cit., 50-1.
22. Demetz, op. cit., 218.
23. Fuchikova, op. cit., 199-208;
24. see Ripellino, op. cit., 74-6.
25. On the date of The Search After Truth, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 286, n. 24.
26. John Schuster, Descartes and the Scientific Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), vol. 2, 566-79.
27. Yates, op. cit., 1-29.
28. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1969), 355-66.
29. Richard Carter, Descartes's Medical Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 175-9;
30. see also his "Descartes's Bio-Physics," Philosophia Naturalis 22 (1985): 223-49.
31. Ripellino, op. cit., 131-43;
32. see also G. G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 64-70.
33. Synopsis from Bedrich Thieberger, The Great Rabbi Loew of Prague (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1955).
34. Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1990);
35. Byron Sherwin, The Golem Legend: Origins and Implications (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985).
36. Popkin, op. cit., 175.
37. Gaukroger, op. cit., 184;
38. for Popkin's imputation of systematic doubt, see his History of Scepticism, 177;
39. for another account of this episode, see Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 46-9.
40. Baillet, op. cit., vol. 1, 160-5.
41. Marin Mersenne, Correspondence, Tome III, C. de Waard, ed. (Paris: CNRS, 1959-88), 199-200.
42. J. R. Partington, History of Chemistry (London: Macmillan, 1963), vol. II, 431.
43. Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), vol. VII, 188.
44. Nouvelle Biographie Generale (Paris, 1854), Tome IX, 663 (my literal trans.).
45. This entry is based on an entry in the 1759 edition of Louis Moreri, Le Grand dictionnaire historique, Tome III, 465, which oddly enough does not appear in the 1727 edition;
46. In addition to the classic studies of René Pintard and Frédéric Lachèvre, several recent works have explored some of the connections between the erudite libertines and philosophical movements in seventeenth-century France. See especially Joan DeJean, Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in 17th Century France (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1981).
47. The epithets "kind dog" and "false dog" were used by the later Greek cynics, according to John Moles, University of Durham (personal communication, May 1999). See his paper "Cynic Cosmopolitanism," in The Cynics: the cynic movement in antiquity and its legacy, R. B. Branham and M.-O. Goulet-Cazé, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 105-20.
48. R. B. Branham, "Defacing the Currency," in The Cynics, 81-104.
49. Popkin, op. cit., 90-7.
50. Sylvain Matton, "Cynicism and Christianity," in The Cynics, 260-4.
51. See Gaukroger, op. cit., 181-2;
52. Shea, op. cit., 124-6; see the index in AT V, 716 for the many letters to and from Guez de Balzac.
53. For the full texts of the letters from Digby to Hobbes, see Thomas Hobbes, Correspondence, Norman Malcolm, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), vol. I, 42-53.
54. Descartes had a modestly good opinion of Digby's work, which he mentions in letters on several occasions; see AT II, 192, 271, 336, 398;
55. Robert Rapley, A Case of Witchcraft: The Trial of Urbain Grandier (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), ch. on "Public Exorcisms."
56. An important point made by D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1981), 7-15;
57. Stephen Greenblatt, "Loudun and London," Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 326-46;
58. and Michel de Certeau, La possession de Loudun (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
59. The absurdity of some of these interrogations was described with great relish by the arch skeptic Pierre Bayle, The Historical and Critical Dictionary, French ed. 1697, English trans., London, 1710, vol. III, 1450-7.
60. For some highly pertinent examples, see James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550-1750 (London: Routledge, 1996), 190-210.
61. Popkin, op. cit., 181.
62. For which, see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10-25.