William James may have been the greatest thinker in history, but Rene Descartes was the most important. That is because there would have been no James if there had been no Descartes. True, such comparisons are not to be taken literally. There'd have been no Descartes if there'd been no Aristotle, no Aristotle if there'd been no Plato, etc. But what made the later thinkers great is that they used the discoveries of their predecessors to make further discoveries of their own.

Unfortunately, Descartes today is more often reviled than revered. Harry Bracken is not far from wrong in claiming...