The Cartesian melodrama in nursing

Abstract

First paragraph: A recent book on Descartes observes that he is quite possibly the most reviled philosopher in history. No other thinker ‘has had such a bad press for so long [or] . . . been the object . . . of such vituperative criticism’ (Bracken 2002, p. 110). The hostility got started early, with the Jesuits prominent during the seventeenth century and has continued, more or less unabated, to the present day. Even the current Pope has taken a swing at Descartes, blaming him for . . . well, pretty much everything that has gone wrong in the western world since about 1640 (John Paul II, 1994). As Bracken wryly notes, little has changed in over 350 years. The arguments are much the same, and there is still a tendency to attack Descartes without first bothering to read him. As a consequence, he comes over as the philosophical equivalent of a James Bond villain (actually, in one painting, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Robert Carlyle): someone quite clearly up to no good, and obviously intent on world domination.