About This Site

What this is

The Descartes Bookshelf (book.themodel.be) is a book guide for people who have been defeated by philosophy books before. This English edition selects six titles currently available on amazon.com and presents them in a reading order that won't defeat you. A Japanese edition is also maintained, along with sister shops The Nietzsche Bookshelf and The Schopenhauer Bookshelf.

The parent project is our sister archive a close reading of the Discourse on the Method (in Japanese, formerly soqdoq.com/descartes): 21 articles reading all six parts of the Discourse section by section. Every review and reading-order recommendation on this site rests on that first-hand reading.

How books are chosen and rated

• Judgements about the primary texts rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading. The Discourse has been read section by section on our sister archive. For the guides and studies on the list, our accounts combine reading with clearly-stated bibliographic research, and each review says so. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
• Where a book is an illustrated guide, a reading companion, or an interpretive study, the review says exactly what it is and what role it can honestly play. A guide is scaffolding, not the building — and we say so.
• All descriptions are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced.
• Quotations are our own glosses of the French and Latin originals with sources indicated — not reproductions of the translations under review.
• Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
• Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.

Amazon link disclosure

As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Descartes Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.

Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, rather than books that merely sell, is in the end what serves readers best.

Privacy policy

This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.

Contact

For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com/descartes.