Russell Shorto is the author of Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, and the director of the John Adams Institute, the American cultural center in Amsterdam. His last book was the bestselling The Island at the Center of the World.

Blog Entries by Russell Shorto

Descartes' Bones

19 Comments | Posted October 31, 2008 | 10:22 AM (EST)


A couple of years ago I culminated a personal odyssey by standing in the basement of a Paris museum exchanging stares with the skull of the French philosopher René Descartes. It seemed a surprisingly small and delicate vessel to have contained the brain that once thought "I think therefore I...

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