Polémico

"Descartes showed us a world divided into mind and matter, and gave us the world as a living, perceiving, enquiring machine.
[...]
His bones were buried, disinterred, re-buried. He was dug up in the French Revolution, he almost made it to the Pantheon. Resting in the gardens nearby, he saw the rise of Napoleon, the advent of the Citizen King, the dawn of the Second Republic, and so on. And each time the clock of history ticked on a bit further, they moved him from here to there.

In short the dead philosopher was unquestionably much busier, better travelled, more argued over, more problematical, more celebrated, more entertained, in every respect far more attended to than ever had been during his rather reclusive quiet life. He became a great posthumous power. In fact both he and his famous dilemma — the Cartesian dilemma — have been buried, disinterred, scattered, venerated, execrated and generally fought over by every generation of philosophers and writers from then to this very day."
Malcolm Bradbury, in To The Hermitage