ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Descartes portrays the crisis of early modernity, as the new scientific worldview is emerging from an older one. When we think about the modern scientific revolution, our focus tends to be on cosmology. This is important, of course, but for Descartes it is just as important to purify matter so that it is nothing but a dance of atoms whose behaviors are fully quantifiable. This is the move that allowed for the accelerated growth in our ability to manipulate the physical world technologically. We cannot undo or unlearn Descartes’ contribution to our understanding of nature. So the response to our current challenges must go through nature understood scientifically and technologically.
