by Russell Shorto · DUOMO EDICIONES · tapa blanda · ISBN 9788493703011
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On a cold winter day in 1650, in Stockholm, René Descartes, the most influential and controversial thinker of his time, was buried far from his home. Sixteen years later, the French ambassador secretly exhumed his bones and transported them to France. Why was this official and devout Catholic so concerned about the remains of a philosopher who was accused of atheism? Why did Descartes' bones follow a strange journey for the next 350 years? The story of these unusual relics involves the most diverse characters, from monarchs to poets, philosophers and physiologists who used the bones for their scientific studies; they stole them, sold them and revered them, fought for them and passed them surreptitiously from hand to hand. The key to this mystery lies in Descartes' famous phrase: cogito ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am'), with which this ambitious Frenchman destroyed 2,000 years of acquired beliefs and laid the foundations of the modern world. Descartes' Bones is a historical and detective story about the creation of modern thought that, through various twists and turns, takes us to the present; to the Paris Museum of Science, where the thinker's remains now dwell.
Russell Anthony Shorto is an American author, historian, and journalist. He is best known for his book on the Dutch origins of New York City, The Island at the Center of the World. Shorto's research for the book relied greatly on the work of the New Netherland Project, now known as the New Netherland Research Center, as well as the New Netherland Institute. Shorto has been the New Netherland Institute's Senior Scholar since 2013.
