Why is a forgery worth so much less than an original work of art?What's so funny about someone slipping on a banana peel? Why, as Freud once asked, is a man wil

These provocative essays take a modern look at the 17th-century thinker's dream, examining the influences of mathematics on society, particularly in light of te

'I realized it was necessary to demolish everything and start again right from the foundations, if I wanted to establish anything in the sciences that was stabl

René Descartes (1596–1650) is one of the towering and central figures in Western philosophy and mathematics. His apothegm “Cogito, ergo sum” marked the b

Descartes, an acknowledged founder of modern philosophy, is identified particularly with mind-body dualism--the view that the mind is an incorporeal entity. But