“Cogito, ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am” – is probably the most famous line ever uttered by a philosopher, and likely the only Latin some Americans know. So today, on what would have been the ...

Margaret C. Jacob is the author of numerous books, including "Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West." She is a professor of history at UCLA and a member of the American ...

Most Americans probably have only a vague notion of Rene Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, as the guy who declared, "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). It's ...

A familiar fable about René Descartes, writes Matthew L. Jones, an assistant professor of history at Columbia University, has it that, around 1640, the philosopher revolutionized the concept of ...

CHINON, FRANCE -- France has always been a nation of philosophers. Descartes contributed rigorous thinking. Montesquieu and Voltaire inspired democracy, and Sartre made it cool to despair. It was ...

At the start of a course of lectures on Aristotle in the 1920s, Martin Heidegger made a terse remark about the relevance of biography to the philosopher’s task when considering the work of a ...

In the Louvre hangs a portrait of a dark-haired, middle-aged man wearing a black coat. The label identifies the figure as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes. It’s a “copy of a Hals” ...