He thought, therefore modern philosophy is

Cogito, Ergo Sum

The Life of Rene Descartes

Richard Watson

David R. Godine: 376 pp., $35

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The lives of philosophers seldom make compelling reading. Can you think of a "drop everything, must buy now" biography of Hegel? Wittgenstein? Newton? The life of a mind when its thoughts are published can change the world, but it is very hard to make such a life into a must-read. There are few hard acts to follow if you are attempting, as Richard Watson does, to write a lively, pugnacious and clear account of a philosophical life, in this case that of Rene Descartes. Widely regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes deserves the appellation. He grounded modern thinking on the ability of the human mind to think clearly and distinctly, and he was the first philosopher to see that the new science of Copernicus and Galileo required a radical reordering of our understanding of physical nature simply around the concepts of matter and motion. During his lifetime and after his death in 1650, he was accused of materialism and atheism and, almost as bad, of consorting with Protestants. The other philosophical giant of the 17th century, Isaac Newton, thought that Descartes' philosophy led straight to atheism and was at pains to hide the enormous debt he owed to Descartes' mechanistic understanding of nature and his mathematics.

While Watson, an accomplished scholar of Cartesianism, has few competitors for the prize of writing a really interesting life of a classic philosopher, he has one big obstacle in his way: Descartes himself. There are huge gaps in the knowable life of Descartes: He tried to conceal his whereabouts for years, vital manuscripts are lost, previous biographers in a less precise age made up stories to keep the narrative flowing and partisans, particularly of the Roman Catholic persuasion, have labored hard to lay Descartes in the Procrustean bed of Baroque Catholicism and its hostile stance toward all competitors. He is said to have been a great friend of the heresy hunter Cardinal Pierre de Berulle, who watched with glee as Louis XIII's army starved into submission the Protestants of La Rochelle. Some even claim that Descartes went approvingly to watch the siege and see the massive fortifications. Shortly thereafter, and inconveniently for those who want Descartes to be a loyal son of the church, he left France and lived for 20 years in the majority Protestant Dutch Republic. There he resided for a time in common law with a Dutch Protestant woman, with whom he had a daughter who died young.