2024.09.3 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Tarek Dika, Descartes’s Method: The Formation of the Subject of Science, Oxford University Press, 2023, 416pp., $115.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192869869.
Reviewed by Patrick Brissey, University of South Carolina
Descartes’s Method by Tarek Dika is perhaps the most thorough book on Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind. It is an exceptional volume written for Cartesian scholars and provides a novel and ingenious interpretation of Descartes’s infamous method, reviving it from literary slumber. Dika provides interesting responses to many of the traditional issues in the literature and is the first author to incorporate the recently published Cambridge Manuscript of the Rules to bolster his interpretation. He provides an in-depth, detailed, and well-documented account of Descartes’s faculty psychology, the non-uniform procedures of the method, the heuristics of enumeration, mathesis universalis as propaedeutic to natural philosophy, the “most noble example,” the non-hierarchical theory of simple natures, the mathematics in Rules 13–21 and how this geometrical…
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