This excellent volume consists of thirteen essays on the objections Descartes received in response to his Meditations, bracketed by a prologue by both editors and an epilogue by Marjorie Grene. The goal of this book is to further an understanding of these objections by discussing them in their historical and philosophical context, and in this it largely succeeds.

As the author repeats, this book is not a history of the concept of analysis but rather an interpretation of the transformation of analysis in the classical sense into analytic in the critical sense. Moreover, the work concentrates not on the concept of analysis itself but rather on the discourse about analysis prevailing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With this focus, the author devotes the greater part of this book to his discussion of what a dozen or so thinkers (...) spanning this period have written about analysis, an important concept with widely divergent meanings. The sorting-out of what analysis means in each thinker of this period seems to be a secondary concern of the author. His primary goal is to advance his interpretation that analysis, a wonderfully inventive power in the hands of seventeenth-century thinkers, suffers a "progressive weakening" in the hands of thinkers of the century following. In this sense, the work is more philosophical than historical. (shrink)