ABSTRACT

I said in the Introduction that what binds our six philosophers together, and to us, is their involvement with and reaction to the distinction between appearance and reality – between the way we subjectively experience the world and the way it objectively is. Descartes is the clearest example of that, and although he is the earliest of the six, and so the most distant from us in time, he is, despite the seeming strangeness of some of his ideas, perhaps the most recognisably modern thinker of them all.