The philosopher who taught us to question everything.What can we know for certain? René Descartes began with that deceptively simple question and helped transform Western philosophy. In Simply Descartes, philosopher Kurt Smith offers an accessible introduction to the life and ideas of the thinker best known for the famous claim, "I think, therefore I am." Smith explains how Descartes used radical doubt to challenge everything that could possibly be mistake...

“Simply Descartes is the perfect one-stop-shop for all matters Cartesian. Smith presents Descartes’s entire system from the ground up, building from metaphysics and epistemology to physics and morality. In some ways, he even goes one step further than the master himself for, with the benefit of hindsight and of the work of leading scholars, Smith reconstructs the system in a neat, orderly, clean and concise way, extracting the disparate pieces from Descartes’s many works scattered...

A Myth For Dragonflies is a heartwarming philosophical comedy set in the late 1790s, in the newly formed United States of America, a product of the Enlightenment, where ancient myths and sacred rites of passage have been abandoned for materialistic science and an unimaginative obsession with the mundane. We follow a father and son who have embarked on a dangerous quest. Although we, inheritors of the Enlightenment, claim to be finished with the sacred systems known to have...

Voting Your Center is a short book geared for the everyday citizen who has decided to take their voting to the next level. Based on an Aristotelian notion of character, philosopher Kurt Smith shows how to apply the concept of logical consistency when in the throes of deciding how to vote. The aim of the book is to help voters toward realizing and preserving their central values.

The Descartes Dictionary is an accessible guide to the world of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences, and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Descartes' thought.The introduction provides a biographical sketch, a brief account of Descartes' philosophical works, and a summary of the current state of Cartesian studies, discu...

Provides students and general readers with a basic understanding of the central concepts, issues, and thinkers of the early modern era of philosophyIs there a world that exists apart from ourselves? If an external world exists, what is its nature?Can an external world based on evidence from our sense perception be known? How do such questions arise? Is it even possible for them to be answered? This is Modern Philosophy: An Introduction surveys how ...

René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, France, on March 31, 1596. He attended a Jesuit college and studied law for two years, but he soon gave up formal academics to immerse himself in “the great book of the world.” In 1618, he joined the army, where he became interested in military engineering and expanded his knowledge of physics and mathematics. Then, one night in 1619, he experienced what he described as divine visions, which inspired him to create a new mathe...