John Cottingham explores imperative components of Descartes's wealthy and wide-ranging philosophical process, together with his debts of idea and language, of freedom and motion, of our courting to the animal area, and of human morality and the behavior of lifestyles. He additionally examines ways that his philosophy has been misunderstood. The Cartesian mind-body dualism that's so frequently attacked is barely part of Descartes's account of what it truly is to be a pondering, sentient, human creature, and how he makes the department among the psychological and the actual is significantly extra refined, and philosophically extra beautiful, than is usually assumed. even if Descartes is usually thought of to be one of many heralds of our sleek secular worldview, the 'new' philosophy which he introduced keeps many hyperlinks with the guidelines of his predecessors, now not least within the all-pervasive function it assigns to God (something that's missed or downplayed by way of many smooth readers); and the nature of the Cartesian outlook is multifaceted, occasionally looking ahead to Enlightenment principles of human autonomy and autonomous clinical inquiry, but additionally occasionally harmonizing with extra conventional notions of human nature as created to discover fulfilment in concord with its creator.