Cottingham, John (ed.) - Descartes

Descartes is one of those very few philosophers whose ideas changed the shape of the subject. Whether for good or ill is at first hard to say. His reputation is a strangely ambivalent one: on the one hand, the revered 'father of modern philosophy'; on the other hand, the reviled source of such dangerous errors that the label 'Cartesian',¹ by the end of the twentieth century, has for many philosophers become almost a term of abuse.²