Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone, a weekly look at the world of philosophy. I'm Alan Saunders.

Now last week we were talking about biographies of philosophers, with someone who is both a philosopher and a biographer of philosophers. He's A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, and the latest biographer of the great 17th century French philosopher, René Descartes, and he joins us now on the line from London. A.C. Grayling, welcome back to The Philosopher's Zone.

A.C. Grayling: Alan, hello again.

Alan Saunders: Hi. Now your book is subtitled The Life of René Descartes and Its Place in His Times, which suggests a rather precise positioning of the life in the times. So how would you characterise the times, and how did they affect the philosophical life of the man?

A.C. Grayling: Well firstly, the first half of the 17th century which spans the whole of Descartes' life, (he was born in 1596, he died in 1650) is one of the most tumultuous and exciting periods in modern history, perhaps because it is the moment of parturition, if you like of the modern world after a long pregnancy starting with Luther nailing his theses to the door at Wittenberg in the early 16th century. And because it's the rise of science and philosophical revolution, and in particular the great war, in fact the greatest war that Europe had ever experienced, the Thirty Years War, took place between 1618 and 1648, coincided with the whole of Descartes' adult life. It seems to me completely improbable that this great philosopher should have lived in a way that was completely unscathed and untouched by those tremendous events and the excitements of the time. And so because I was interested in the intellectual history and the actual history of that period anyway, when I was asked to consider writing about René Descartes, I immediately had the feeling that there would be a really interesting insight or connection to be made between the life and the times, and so it proved. Because when I took the details of Descartes' life as if on a transparency, and I laid them over the details of the time, I was struck and astonished, amazed, by what appeared at first to be a whole series of coincidences between events in the early adult life of Descartes and these great happenings.

Alan Saunders: What sort of coincidences are they?

A.C. Grayling: Well I think I'd say firstly of course that there is the well-enough known coincidence that Descartes lived at a time when the intellectual spirit of Europe was caught up in the first great outpouring of scientific progress, progress in mathematics, and a revolution in philosophy, which shed the old Aristolean influence and looked at all the central problems of philosophy in a fresh new light, which is of course Descartes' own greatest contribution to this. So everybody knows about that. Here was a man who lived at an hour that needed him. But the occasions I just mentioned have to do with the fact that Descartes kept on popping up in the most improbable places in Europe, where great events, connected with the beginning of the Thirty Years War, were happening, and after a while I began to realise that he was in some way associated with them. Not in a major capacity, but in a minor capacity. In short, and not to keep on teasing the point, I began to recognise that it was quite probable that he was a spy, and that he was popping up in all these different places because like many, many other people at the time, so he was by no means alone in this, he was working on the side of one side of the great argument of the day, which was the attempt by Catholic Europe to recover Protestant Europe for Catholicism, and that's what the Thirty Years War was very largely about.

Alan Saunders: Now previous biographers have of course recognised that Descartes was a soldier, that he was an officer in the army of Prince Maurice, but you're going much further than that, in suggesting not just that he was a spy, but that he was a Jesuit spy, a spy for the Jesuits, who had of course, educated him. He went to a Jesuit school at La Fleche, in France.

A.C. Grayling: That's correct, yes. Educated by them, and of course Jesuit education was an education by immersion into the culture and the outlook. It was a first-rate education scientifically and philosophically, and in the Classics, but it was also a capture of the soul as well. That after all, was the point of the Society of Jesus which regarded itself as the vanguard of the army for Catholicism. So when he emerged from La Fleche, this great school in France that the Jesuits had founded, under Henri IV, Henry IV of France, he was very, very completely Jesuit, so for the rest of his life, always wanted his works to be adopted by the Jesuits as textbooks in their schools. He later became ordained himself but he was utterly loyal to the Catholic and Jesuit cause. That's the first thing.

The second thing is that it seems quite extraordinary really that after his year, or perhaps two years at Poitiers University where he read law, that he should choose to go as a Jesuit-educated Catholic to join the army of the Protestant and Prince of Orange in the Free Netherlands, which he did rather briefly, and just at the time that the Great Synod of Dordt was taking place, which was the tremendous controversy within the church in the Free Netherlands, over whether they were going to have the harder Calvinist line on predestination, or whether they were going to become softer Arians who were more amenable really to the Catholic view. And as soon as that great controversy was over, and lost by the softer line view, he left to join another army, this time the army of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, never, by the way, in any combatant capacity, always in some way an observer, or in some sort of marginal attached capacity. And he was present at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, which precipitated the real fighting of the Thirty Years War, and stayed in Bohemia while Bohemia was being reduced by the armies of Duke Maximilian back to Catholicism, at the point of a sword, very savage period in the history of the Thirty Years War. But he also travelled very widely in Europe and, by the way, on rather a small income. And wherever he travelled, and whenever he travelled, he kept on popping up in the most unlikely places, for example, just when the French were going to nip off the Valtellina, which was the route for the Spanish Habsburgs up through Switzerland on the way to their possessions in what is now Belgium, and at that particular point it would have been a bit like going on holiday to Baghdad now, you know, who should pop up there but Descartes, you know, at a moment of great danger. Anyway, his adventures went on and on, and I'll just end by saying that in 1628, which is the year that he left France finally and went off to spend the rest of his life living in exile, in secret, keeping his address private from everybody other than Mersenne and moving constantly from one address to another in the Netherlands, all of which looks, of course, very suspicious. But it was just in that year, so standard legends have it, that he was invited to an interview with the great Cardinal, Bérulle who said to him, 'Oh René, you're so clever, you must go off and live in exile the rest of your life and write philosophy now'. Whereupon René said, 'Oh, bon idée,' and went off and did it. And it's a very implausible story, because Cardinal Bérulle was the founder of the Oratorian Order, which he had set up in order to oppose the influence of the Jesuits, and just at that time, 1628, France, which although a Catholic country, was always on the side of the Protestants, in order to keep the balance of power in Europe, was just about to get active again in the military sense, and I'm convinced that Cardinal Bérulle invited Descartes to his office to say to him, 'We know what you've been up to. Get out of France.'

Alan Saunders: Well, this runs contrary to, or perhaps it doesn't, but it seems to challenge the standard view of Descartes, which is that his ideas, particularly his ideas on the physical universe, his scientific ideas rather than his philosophical ideas, were too challenging for him to live in France and that he was essentially an intellectual exile who went to breathe the freer air of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and who was very troubled by the fate of Galileo, who was condemned by the Inquisition.

A.C. Grayling: He was certainly troubled by Galileo's fate because he was very anxious always to be, or at least to appear, as orthodox as possible in Catholic terms. He didn't want to fall foul of the Inquisition, and he wrote letter after letter after anxious letter to his great correspondent, Mersenne in Paris, trying to assure him and everybody that Mersenne spoke to that he wasn't at all interested in controverting the revealed doctrines of the Catholic church, and at that time the book that he was writing, says it was too Galilean in its outlook, he dismembered and rewrote in ways that wouldn't be offensive. So that particular point is true. But actually in the France of the day, people like Mersenne, who after all was the translator into French of Galileo, and various others were living and writing and doing philosophy and science in ways very, very similar to Descartes' way, without any fear of prosecution and without ever getting into trouble. Whereas in the Netherlands, after Descartes had been there for a little while, he got embroiled in the most furious controversies, or at least his epigones did, that is to say those people who were teaching is views in the new universities in the Netherlands, then of course a very rich and flourishing country, the sort of new country with lots of universities springing up all over the place. But his views were adopted in some of them, but they caused great theological controversy, and these fabulous quarrels in which Descartes eventually himself became embroiled, writing letters which by the way don't do him any credit at all because anybody who disagreed with him, he used to be violently angry with, and would write very scurrilous attacks on them. So in a way his experience in the Netherlands was every bit as tumultuous, with one exception, and that is that getting into geological disputations in the Netherlands didn't end up at the stake, which is what might very well have happened in a Catholic country then.

Alan Saunders: Let's go back to his military career, and what could have been a decisive moment in his intellectual development. He says that he was I think in Bavaria and he says he was in a stove, and a stove actually means a room that is heated by a stove. And I think the point about that is that the actual fire is on the other side of the wall so no servants are coming in to tend the fire, you are totally alone, you are about as alone as you can be in the 17th century. And he says that in there, he had three dreams and these dreams determined him on his philosophical career. Now there's been much speculation about these dreams, and much speculation as to whether they happened at all. Tell us about the dreams and what your view of them is.

A.C. Grayling: Yes, this is a very, very interesting thing, for a number of different reasons. One is that as you say, this event happened in his life while he was in transit really. He joined the army of Duke Maximilian, in fact he'd been at the coronation of Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor who was prompted by the Jesuits having a Jesuit confessor to go to war to recover Protestant Europe for Rome. So this coronation was a very, very significant moment and Descartes had been there. And he was in a very leisurely way, travelling to rejoin the army of Maximilian, when this happened. And as you say, he got himself very comfortably and snugly set up in this stove-heated room, and spent the day thinking about the philosophy of mathematics, and especially about a method that would be guaranteed to arrive at truth. This is the great thing that everybody at the time was interested in, and Descartes himself was no exception. And after this day of feverish thinking and being closeted in this very hot room, he went to sleep and he had three dreams, which he very carefully recorded.

Alan Saunders: What were René Descartes' three dreams, and why did they mean so much to him? Well, you'll have to wait till next week to find out. Only seven sleeps to go. Or you could read A.C. Grayling's Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in His Times, which is published by Simon and Schuster at $39.95. More of A.C. Grayling and Descartes next week.