Rosen, Gary. "Body of Knowledge." NEW YORK TIMES October 31, 2008.

Shorto, Russell. Descartes' Bones: a Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason. New York: Doubleday, 2008. For Shorto, the pivot upon which the old world yielded to the new was the genius of Descartes, the philosopher who gave us the doubting, analytical, newly independent modern self. The Frenchman’s most famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” may strike our own ears as a coffee-mug cliché, but in the 17th century it was a revolutionary declaration. Shorto’s achievement is to complicate this picture, and with it our understanding of modernity, by also describing the religious context of the philosopher’s ideas. Though Descartes’s name has come to be associated with unrelenting rationalism, he was “as devout a Catholic as anyone of his time,” Shorto writes, and looked to theology to support his system. As Shorto recognizes, our own fundamentalists, religious and secular alike, might draw some useful lessons in modesty from Descartes’s example. Descartes made a cameo appearance in Shorto’s previous book, The Island at the Center of the World (2004), a richly detailed revisionist history of 17th-­century Dutch Manhattan and its liberalizing influence on America’s British colonies. In those pages, we encountered the philosopher as a celebrity in Holland, where he lived for almost two decades and, in 1637, published his seminal Discourse on the Method. Descartes takes center stage in Shorto’s new book, but not in the way one might expect. The action opens in the winter of 1650, with the hapless Frenchman on his deathbed in faraway Stockholm, cursing the fate that had lured him to the Swedish court of Queen Christina. By Page 40, after an instructive synopsis of his controversial career, exit Descartes, a corpse — and enter a large, motley cast of Cartesians, determined to do right by their teacher’s ideas and by his moldering, displaced bones. Shorto makes deft use of the centuries-­long to-and-fro over Descartes’s remains, a tale that involves three different burials, events in six countries and lingering questions, partly resolved by the author himself, about the authenticity of the skeleton, or rather of its scattered parts. As it turns out, the skull of the philosopher was separated mysteriously, at an early date, from the rest of his bones. This macabre fact provides Shorto with the makings of a detective story but also with an irresistible metaphor. Descartes’s chief contribution to modern science and philosophy was his radical focus on epistemology, on defining the boundaries of what we are capable of knowing with certainty. At the center of this project was his assertion of mind-body dualism, the notion, as Shorto explains, that “the mind and its thoughts exist in a different category or somehow on a different plane from the physical world.” For his admirers and for a latter-day scientific establishment aware of its debt to him, what could be more urgent than identifying and uniting the deceased philosopher’s own head and body? Read the rest of the review here (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/review/Rosen-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin) and a short extract from the book here (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/chapters/chap-decartes-bones.html?ref=review).