Richard A. Watson
Contributor
BIOGRAPHY
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Author of The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics; Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes; and others.
Primary Contributions (3)
René Descartes was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was one of the first to abandon Scholastic Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the development of a new…
READ MORE
Publications (2)
Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes (April 2002)
Rene Descartes was a highly influential philosopher, mathematician, and scientist and is regarded as the Father of modern philosophy and mathematics. This is the biography of Descartes, and it describes the life of Descartes, in the flesh and blood, rather than a technical analysis of his philosophical, scientific, and mathematical ideas.
The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics (January 1998)
Combines historical research and philosophical analysis to cast light on why and how Cartesianism failed as a complete metaphysical system. Far more radical in its conclusions than his 1966 study The Downfall of Cartesianism (a slightly revised version of which forms the main body of the current work), Watson argues that Descartes's ontology is incoherent and vacuous, his epistemology deceptive, and his theology unorthodox--indeed, that Descartes knows nothing.