Margaret Jacobs summarizes what she describes as “one of the most powerful metaphors in the Discourse : Descartes repudiates the wisdom of the ages, comparing it to those ‘old cities’ build on the foundations of ancient and medieval ruins. With a vision one imagines as shaped by the ordered and relatively new cities of the Dutch Republic, with their geometric and planned regularity, Descartes would have us build cities designed as those cities might have appeared to him, by ‘a single architect,’ ‘by the human will operating according to reason.’”
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