Descartes As a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism (JHP Books)

Although commentary on Descartes is voluminous, the importance of morality in his thought has been all but overlooked in contemporary English-language scholarship. Considered to be the first modern philosopher, he is often interpreted as a wholly secular thinker who acknowledged no authority above the human will. In this important reassessment of the great French philosopher, Gary Steiner shows the influence of Christian thought on the moral foundations of Descartes’s philosophy.

Steiner provides a close analysis of all of Descartes’s texts and correspondence bearing on morality. By placing his work in historical context, Descartes’s indebtedness not only to Galileo and Bacon in developing his conception of autonomous human reason becomes clear, but also to Augustine and Aquinas in conceptualizing the human condition and the role of belief in God. Providing an extensive survey of German, French, and English scholarship on Descartes, Steiner concludes with an in-depth examination of contemporary debates about secularization, nihilism, and modernity in such thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, and Karl Löwith. Steiner shows how Descartes’s own ambivalence about the relation between faith and reason can shed light on contemporary controversies about what Blumenberg calls "the legitimacy of the modern age."