Abstract

Much too often, we are guilty of monumentalizing historical persons. As monuments, these people stop being persons, and instead function as placeholders. Monuments can be placeholders for that which is good, or that which is bad. Depending upon one's predictions for such phenomena as "The Enlightenment" and "The Scientific Revolution", one is likely to place either wreaths or garbage at the foot of the monument that is René Descartes. To his credit, Keith Devlin does neither in "Goodbye,Descartes". In the post-war era, trendy circles often find Descartes to be the convenient whipping-boy for all that is wrong with our relationship to the natural world: the subject-object divide, a dispassionate attitude, hyper-rationality, and a context-free world of practices. This use of Descartes ultimately means that no longer does anyone seriously examine his work or closely trace its ramifications. Instead one just evokes his name as the locus of rationality, the side of the Enlightenment, or the turning point from enchantment.