Descartes in Winter: Thinking in Smoke and Snow
Chad Cordova, Assistant Professor of French, Cornell University, presents his research.
Descartes has often been read as a thinker whose dualist metaphysics paved the way for the ecological catastrophe of Western modernity. But this canonical reading has long obscured the real ecological ambivalence in Descartes’s work. In his lecture, Chad Córdoba focuses on the wintry climate in Descartes’s writings, on winter as a time for scientific observation, on the stove as a material structure, on Descartes’s phenomenology of the cold, and on the eco-philosophical significance of his being caught – and ultimately killed – by winter (February 11, 1650).
Link to the seminar in Zoom:
Last updated: 2026-01-12
Source: Department of Culture and Aesthetics