Knowledge,Descartes

An http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061120crbo_books article about Descartes in the New Yorker, written by Anthony Gottlieb,author of "The Dream of Reason," a highly readable history of western thought from the Greeks to the early modern period.
The article emphasizes the point that in his own time Descartes was better known as a scientist than as a philosopher, his life as a wanderer, that God not the self was the centre of his philsophy, and that he was desperately anxious to unite the mind and the body-so are we all. Sadly, he was discovered by Court ladies and amateur intellectuals before he was taken seriously in any university.