Roger Ariew (Ph. D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is professor of philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the author of Descartes and the Last Scholastics and the editor, with Marjorie Grene, of Descartes and His Contemporaries, and, with Daniel Garber, of the 10-volume reprint collection, Descartes in Seventeenth-Century England. He is also the editor and translator of Descartes: Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, of Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, with Daniel Garber, and, of Background Source Materials: Descartes’ Meditations, with John Cottingham and Tom Sorell. Ariew’s research has been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency.
Dennis Des Chene (Ph. D., Stanford University) is associate professor of philosophy at Emory University. He is the author of Physiologia: Philosophy of Nature in Descartes and the Aristotelians; Life’s Form, Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul; and Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes.
Douglas M. Jesseph (Ph. D., Princeton University) is professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis and Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mathematics. He is the editor and translator of Berkeley’s De Motu and The Analyst and the editor of the forthcoming three-volume Hobbes’s Mathematical Works.
Tad M. Schmaltz (Ph. D., University of Notre Dame) is associate professor of philosophy at Duke University. He is the author of Malebranche’s Theory of the Soul: A Cartesian Interpretation and Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes.
Theo Verbeek (Ph. D., University of Utrecht) is professor of philosophy at the University of Utrecht. He is the author of La querelle d’Utrecht; Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesianism (1637–1650); and Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise: Exploring the “Will of God.” He is the editor of Descartes et Regius: Autour de l’explication de l’esprit and Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century.
Skull on display at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris,
alleged to be Descartes’s