ABSTRACT
The Introduction presents the main aim of the book, which is to offer a distinctive, detailed, and comprehensive account of Descartes’s ethical thought. The book argues that Descartes’s ethics constitutes a form of moral perfectionism, according to which each person ought always to do what would be most conducive to their degree of overall perfection—or equivalently, for Descartes, to their degree of overall being or reality. Since Descartes never wrote a treatise devoted exclusively to ethics, the Introduction also highlights the most important places in his writings where he does engage with the subject. It furthermore contains a few words about the method used in the book, and about Descartes´s way of occasionally drawing on ideas that he finds in, for example, the ethics of Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus.
