Miles, Murray. Insight and Inference: Descartes's Founding Principle and Modern Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 564 p. Toronto Studies in Philosophy. biblio. index. $120.00. ISBN 0-8020-4315-1. CCIP. DDC 194.

This academic study by Brock University philosopher Murray Miles is a lengthy contribution to the voluminous scholarly literature on Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the "father of modern philosophy." Its primary focus is ostensible on Descartes's foundational principle cogito, ergo sum ("I am thinking, therefore I exist"), but Miles discourses on a broad range of metaphysical, epistemological, and historical issues regarding Descartes's philosophy and its relation to earlier and later philosophical systems and methodologies. Critical of what he regards as the standard view of Cartesianism (particularly among English-language philosophers). Miles argues that Descartes's famous dualism is essentially a type of metaphysical realism that inverts the order of knowing and the order of being of the Aristotelian Scholastic realism to which is proposed as an alternative. Miles draws on the views of numerous commentators on Descartes from the 17th century to the present time, but has a special interest in the relevance of the insights of Husserl and Heidegger. This crudite but somewhat long-winded study contains 139 pages of endnotes and will be helpful mainly to those students of Descartes's philosophy who are interested in the relation of Cartesianism to either medieval Scholasticism or 20th-century phenomenology. Compared to many other commentators, Miles has relatively little interest in Descartes's importance in (and for) the history of science or the history of liberal religion.

Even scholars who regard Miles's approach as one-dimensional will find some interesting historical and philosophical suggestions in this work. Though the book is integrated by its focus on a few themes, it can be profitably consulted by students of Descartes interested in any number of traditional topics of discussion. Still, the book is not a satisfactory introduction to Descartes's philosophy, partly because of its often unnecessarily technical manner of expression, which contrasts jarringly with Descartes's own elegantly unpretentious philosophical prose–a monumental and justly respected reflection of this great French author's fervent commitment to the critical importance of clear and distinct ideas. And while Miles usefully observes in places how commentators have frequently misunderstood the historical context of Descartes's project, Miles's own interpretations are often conspicuously anachronistic.

Jay Newman