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Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason

Book by Russell Shorto · 4 quotes · Tools, Ability, Advancing

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Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason Quotes

“Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools.”

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Book:Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason
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“In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.”

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Book:Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason
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