All authors are indebted to those who have helped (and to those who by hindering have sharpened the point). This project on Descartes before he became a published author took form only recently, although understanding Descartes as a Dutch philosopher had been an aspect of an earlier book. In retrospect, questions had been building in my mind for some decades, no doubt from conversations with David Lux, Hilton Root, Carol Lansing, and other fellow students during my graduate student years and the mentorship of Toon Kerkhoff and especially Harm Beukers during the first period when I was in The Netherlands learning about early modern Dutch medicine and science. More recently, I have been inspired by the work and rare conversation of Chandra Mukerji, who has opened my eyes more than anyone to the importance of military engineering and impersonal governance in Descartes’s period, which provided a foundation for thinking about his work afresh.
My deepest debt, however, is to the students I have had, undergraduates as well as graduate students, whose questions and answers helped me confront some of the usual historical accounts I was passing on about commonly named persons and ideas. I have come to appreciate the importance of teaching-led research, which requires course leaders continually to reexamine what they know, what they need to explore further, and how it might make sense in terms of other parts of knowledge. These days we often hear about the importance of justifying our craft through public engagement, which often takes the form of telegraphing exciting conclusions; but for instructors the first and daily engagement with students stimulates investigations over many years with attention to particular questions and problems as a part of sustained conversations. Attentive study brings light. It is a real privilege to have been able to work among alert colleagues and students over the past three and a half decades, most recently at Brown University, and to have been supported in recent years by one of its former students, John F. Nickoll, who has generously given to sustain the enterprise.
Recently, three especially sharp and energetic students at Brown University who took a chance to enroll in a seminar on Descartes and His Age helped me understand what they wanted and needed to know: Anna Martin, Gina Milano, and Rebecca Millstein. Their enthusiasm for the subject encouraged me to keep looking. A chance to speak with Paul Knoll and other residents of the Mirabella in Portland, Oregon, was also very encouraging. I am especially grateful to the early support offered by family, friends, and colleagues when I tried out on them the idea of writing a book on Descartes before he became a philosopher.
Other important aid came from chances to explore the legacy of Descartes and his work in academic conferences or workshops. One of my first outbursts about my unhappiness with the usual account was expressed about a decade ago at a large public forum hosted by the astute but patient scholars of the Descartes Centre in Utrecht, not far from where some of the first confrontations about Descartes’s views were shouted almost four centuries ago. A request a few years ago from Larry Nolan to write a short summary on “Medicine” for The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon prompted me to work through some of Descartes’s writings more systemically than I had done before. I am thankful to the program committees of three academic associations who agreed to let me speak on aspects of Descartes at their annual meetings: the History of Science Society, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Renaissance Society of America. I am also grateful for invitations to speak when early parts of the book were coming together, particularly the Oslo Medical History Institute, the Institute for the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World at the University of Minnesota, the Early Sciences Working Group and the Early Modern History Workshop of Harvard University, and the Department of History of Reed College.
Opportunities for periods of time devoted to reading and research are also crucial for any author. My special thanks, for a four-month fellowship, are due to the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, and to the staff and fellows who made up such a lively community, at the end of which Faye and I were able to rent a car and travel to many of the northern European places associated with Descartes.
This being a project almost entirely based on printed materials, I extend my gratitude to the librarians and staff of the Rockefeller and Hay libraries at Brown University, especially those who efficiently handled all the Interlibrary Loan requests. Academic colleagues and acquaintances were also generous not only with supportive goodwill but also with suggestions for reading that helped in countless ways. I am especially grateful to the knowledgeable assistance offered by Maria Pia Donato, Robert Schneider, Daniel Garber, Joan Richards, Jim Bono, and David Sacks, as well as to conversations with Theo Verbeek, Catherine Wilson, Brooke Holmes, Stephen Gaukroger, Malcolm Smuts, Ofer Gal, Tonba Ghadessi, Evelyn Lincoln, Caroline Castiglione, and Tara Nummedal. Lyse Mesmer has taken some prompts and turned them into wonderful working maps. Thanks to Lori Meek Schuldt for expert copyediting, and to Eileen Quam for an intelligent index. Karen Merikangas Darling, as editor of works in the history and philosophy of the sciences, encouraged this project and helped shape its framing; she also obtained helpful opinion from referees. The three reviews she obtained were enormously helpful. I remain indebted to the systems of review that support scholarly publication and which rely mainly on the shared generosity of writerly communities. Errors of fact and interpretation remain my own responsibility.
One person has patiently taken onboard all the absentmindedness and ups and downs that come with long-term projects and even helped me chase the ghost of Descartes on the ground, sustaining her constant support and love throughout, without whom this could not have been completed: Faye.