 Leaving aside such blatant misinterpretations, what is  Descartes' legacy now? The breadth of his influence in the seventeenth century is permanent, including his specific contributions in mathematics and optics, his vision for a mechanistic  physiology, and the model he offered to Newton of a unified celestial and terrestrial physics that assigns a few basic properties to a ubiquitous matter the motions of which are governed by a few simple laws. In this regard, Descartes'  work offers an example of culturally engaged philosophy. Descartes had a sense  for the fundamental philosophical issues of his time, many of which concerned the theory of nature and the attempt to found a new natural science. He not only offered a systematic reformulation of the extant natural philosophy, but he did so in a way that could be heard and understood.