I teach Descartes in introductory college courses. I know a little about him. I love Descartes. He was a true genius in whose shadow we today yet live, for better or for worse. But by themselves Descartes' philosophy and his masterpiece the "Meditations on First Philosophy" are treasures of the human spirit.
Reading Wilson's introduction to that great work, I am tempted to hate Descartes. It is intended as an inroad for the general university student coming to Descartes, perhaps philosophy, for the first time. I can imagine no better way to make young minds hate Descartes and develop (or intensify their pre-extant) misology than to put this in their hands.
The claims of the book, its' arguments on their own merits, with these I sincerely take few great issues. The problem is the presentation, which is severely poor. The text is painfully dry, dull, boring, agonizingly overwrought, in short, it obscures the ideas it is intended to clarify and sucks the life from Descartes' philosophy. In short, what ought to render the original accessible and interesting to the novice does entirely the opposite.
One merit, in principle, though not here in execution, of the author's approach is the interweaving of the Descartes' arguments with their respective objections made by his contemporaries. What might serve to helpfully broaden the reader's scope instead results in enormously circuitous routes to ends which leave Descartes' thought seemingly more contorted than elucidated. Rarely does Wilson ever come to the point and simply lay things out in clear fashion. To zip through this book might help one to organize the dialogue between Descartes and his interlocutors, but that is all, because Wilson's explanations of said fail to penetrate the surface of the original texts.
Another flaw - fatal to my mind - is that the author does not stay properly close to the Meditations themselves. This book is not functional for reading side-by-side with the original. If one would prefer a substitute for reading Descartes that is more difficult to follow than the original, then this book is for you!
The text is overly elaborate where simple and straightforward language would not only suffice, but be more appropriate. Yet at the same time, crucial concepts are often not boiled-down to their basic meaning, or where they are, they are given superfluous and even ridiculous monickers. I was at a loss to find certain concepts which trouble my introductory students without exception because the technical vocabulary of the age was quite different that our ordinary language today. Had I not glanced at the author's impressive C.V. I'd have assumed she'd never taught Descartes to undergraduates. My guess now is she has not been in front of intro students for a long, long, time (or that she only teaches turbo-geeks). The author is clearly analytically trained, rather than a proper historian of philosophy, hence it is not surprising that cumbersome terminological artifice abounds. Take, for example, the "Causal Non-inferiority Principle," (that a cause is necessarily greater than its effect), which is discussed ad nauseum despite its perfect simplicity. One senses the book is struggling in vain to justify its own existence by creating a sheen of depth through a constant flow of plain and redundant illustrative examples and diagrams. While one should think such is proper to a text of this sort, the overall effect it that any reader capable of surviving these frankly boring discussions couldn't but feel patronized.
Yes: I am a "continentalist" by training. But I study and appreciate Analytic philosophy as well, and am no wanna-be Derridean goofball. The virtue of the analytic interpretive approach is its clarity and rigor. This text might be rigorous in certain respects, but it is not clear to an ordinary reader - and that is the crucial problem.
Hence, the most generosity I can muster is to say this book is simply mislabeled. It is not an introduction. It might serve the advanced undergraduate philosophy major or early graduate student who is training in the analytic tradition and who enjoys believing their acumen at following such labyrinthine intellectual puzzles means they are better than someone actually able to explain Descartes' arguments and broader historical significance. Anyone else would be better served spending their time reading the original over and again, and/or use something like the "Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Descartes and the Meditations" by Gary Hatfield. It is not, in my opinion, fantastic, but it is far more appropriate, not to mention a bargain by comparison, than this behemoth.