Religio Philosophi

As I write these words, I am sitting in a hotel room in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Three hundred and fifty years ago or so this area was frequented by my people. I dont mean my ancestors, who were in an altogether different part of Europe, doing very different things. I mean the people I study. In earlyand mid-seventeenth-century Paris you could find many of the people who made science and philosophy what it is today. Descartes lived here for a while; though he moved away, he came back from time to time, and his spirit (immaterial, of course) haunted these streets for many years. Pascal lived here, around the corner, actually. Mersenne lived across the river, in a neighborhood to which one could walk in thirty or forty-five minutes. I dont know where Hobbes lived during the crucial decade of his life that he spent here, but it must have been close; Paris wasnt that big back then. Ditto for Gassendi. A few years later Leibniz was to visit for three short years that shaped the rest of his intellectual life.