Descartes’ Olympica

Richard Kennington.  “Descartes’ Olympica,” On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. P. Kraus and F. Hunt. Lexington Books. 2004.

Excerpt:

The Olympica”–Decartes’ youthful account of dreams and their interpretations–is believed to be the one writing in which ‘the founder of modern rationalism’ claims a divine inspiration for his philosophy. According to Gilson, ‘at least at the time of the Olympica, he places a certain inspiration at the origin of philisophy, a point to which Decartes never returned, neither to reaffirm it, nor to deny it.’ The ‘inspiration’ in question is divine: ‘the sentiment experienced by Descates that he was invested by God with the mission of constituting the body of the sciences and thus, as a consequence, to establish true wisdom.

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