Descartes' Discourse on Method has long been regarded as a seminal contribution to modern philosophy. We can now see that it is also one of the key texts in the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century.

René Descartes (1596–1650) did major research in optics, geometry, astronomy and physiology, although (partly because Galileo had just been condemned by the Inquisition) he published nothing until he was over forty. The Discourse forms the preface to his first collection of scientific papers (1637), sketching in a new method based on hypothesis and deduction which was soon to replace traditional techniques derived from Aristotle. This edition puts the work in context, by including extracts from Descartes’ correspondence, the Rules for Guiding One’s Intelligence and from The World – a posthumously published summary of his physical theories, which at one point in its chequered life had to be rescued from the river Seine. The age of Newton marks one of the great turning points in intellectual history; Descartes has a key place at its very heart.

A companion volume Meditations and other Metaphysical Writings by Descartes is also published in Penguin Classics.

This book reappraises the fourth royal governor of North Carolina, one-time surveyor-general of Ireland, known for his pamphlets on Irish and colonial economics and for his geographer's interest in the Northwest Passage. Dobbs is presented as a man with ideas in advance of his time.
Originally published in 1957.
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Descartes is commonly read as the paradigm defender of substance dualism, a theory caricatured by Ryle as the 'dogma of the ghost in the machine'. On this reading, mind and body are defined in such a way that they have no common properties that might help explain how they interact, and it is therefore impossible to provide any account of precisely those features of human experience that this 'theory' was meant to explain. Thus Descartes proposed an obvious dead-end and almost any beginner in philosophy can diagnose where he went wrong. Apart from its intrinsic implausibility, Desmond Clarke offers good reasons for thinking that this cannot have been Descartes's view. Descartes was an unrelenting critic of what Scholastics called 'substantial forms'. One cannot explain how we succeed in thinking by saying, simply, that we have a thinking faculty. Cartesian objections to forms apply equally to substances. Descartes also argued that we know nothing about substances apart from their properties, so that substances are not available as independent explanatory entities. Finally, Descartes's own efforts to explain sensations, memory, imagination or the passions all involve rather speculative accounts of how the brain and the central nervous system work. Clarke's compelling and important new reading shows that a failure to engage with Descartes's scientific work leads to a wholesale misunderstanding of his theory of mind. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of Descartes, and throughout the philosophies of mind and science.

Descartes is possibly the most famous of all writers on the mind, but his theory of mind has been almost universally misunderstood, because his philosophy has not been seen in the context of his scientific work. Desmond Clarke offers a radical and convincing rereading, undoing the received perception of Descartes as the chief defender of mind/body dualism. For Clarke, the key is to interpret his philosophical efforts as an attempt to reconcile his scientific pursuits with the theologically orthodox views of his time.

Volume I of The Cambridge History of Africa provides the first relatively complete and authoritative survey of African prehistory from the time of the first hominids in the Plio-Pleistone up to the spread of iron technology after c.500 BC. The volume therefore sets the stage for the history of the continent contained in the subsequent volumes. The material remains of past human life recovered by excavation are described and interpreted in the light of palaeo-ecological evidence, primate studies and ethnographic observation, to provide a record of the evolving skills and adaptive behaviour of the prehistoric populations. The unique discoveries in East and South Africa of early hominid fossils, stone tools and other surviving evidence are discussed with full documentation, leading on to the coming of Modern Man and the beginning of regional patterning. The volume provides a survey of the now considerable material showing the different ways of life in the forests, savannas and arid zones during the 'Later Stone Age'.