Descartes's correspondence

COMMENTARY

Chronology. The notable increase in Descartes’s correspondence in 1637 and 1638 corresponds with the publication of his first major works, the Discours de la méthode along with his Dioptrique, Météores and Géométrie in 1637.

Survival. Descartes’s subsequent celebrity guaranteed that letters from him survived in much greater quantity than letters to him.

Geography. The pink circles (representing outgoing conrrespondence) predominate, pinpointing the numerous places where Descartes resided, primarily in Holland. Aside from his native France and his adoptive Holland, the major outliers are his correspondence with Henry More in Cambridge and with Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate in Brandenburg. The relatively small number and constrained reach of Descartes’s correspondence accords with his self-fashioning as a highly independent thinker and self-made philosopher. Nevertheless, his correspondence is famous for its philosophical content: his ethical views, to mention only the most important case, are most fully expounded in his letters.

Date source. Charles Adam and Gérard Milhaud, Correspondance de Descartes, 8 vols (Paris, 1936–1963). Converted the edition of  into a computer readable text in the 1990s by Katsuzo Murakami (University of Tokyo), Meguru Sasaki (École normale supérieure d’Hokkaido), and Takehumi Tokoro (University of Chyuo), Prepared for publication on the ePistolarium by Erik-Jan Bos and Dirk Roorda (DANS). Integrated into Early Modern Letters Online by Miranda Lewis: see EMLO catalogue page for further details.

Map source. Yann Ryan (Oxford and QMUL), executed within the Networking Archives project (AHRC AH/R014817/1). Interactive version available here.

Further reading. A selection of his most important letters are available in English translation in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III: Letters, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge, 1991)