Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason

From bestselling, prize-winning author Russell Shorto comes a grand and strange history of the on-going debate between religion and science-seen through the oddly momentous journey of the skull and bones of the great French philosopher Rene Descartes. In this book Shorto brilliantly shows how this argument first started with Descartes and how his ideas (and bones) have remained central to this theoretical struggle for over 350 years. On a brutal winter's day in 1650 in Stockholm, Frenchman ...