Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life by Deborah Brown and Calvin Normore : Deborah Brown and Calvin Normore. Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 255. Cloth,

In a recent poem, Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland, German writer Durs Grünbein suggests that a snowy, white landscape inspired the young René Descartes to theoretically define nature. Indeed, Descartes's reduction of nature to extended matter composed of particles in movement and abiding by the laws of nature entails a reduction of all bodies' diversity to a mechanistic system in which all secondary qualities are mathematically framed.