My aim … is to show that the celestial machine is likened not to a kind of divine living being but rather to a clockwork. I consider the human body to be a machine … Although it may exaggerate to say that Descartes fathered the mechanization of biology, it is true that his Treatise of Man provided the first systematic development of the idea that a complete understanding of all the phenomena of life, including all abilities and behaviour of animals, (...) can be achieved by viewing living things as machines. To make this out, Decartes had to learn to think about living things in a new way. My first aim here is to identify the fundamental conceptual innovations at work in Descartes’ attempt to extend the new mechanics to include biology. My second aim is to locate the point at which Descartes’ mechanical imagination runs out. This requires study of Descartes’ scientific work on sense. (shrink)

In his recent survey of the “dialectic of creation” in seventeenth-century philosophy, Thomas Lennon has suggested that Descartes’s assumptions about causality encourage a kind of “pantheistic emanationism”. Lennon notes that Descartes regularly invokes the principle that there is nothing in the effect which was not previously present, either formally or eminently, in the cause. Descartes also believes that God is the continuous, total, and efficient cause of everything. From these assumptions it should follow that everything that exists in the created (...) world is previously present in God. Indeed, Descartes embraces the emanationist doctrine explicitly when, at the end of his replies to the Second Set of Objections, he arranges the arguments of the Meditations in “geometrical fashion.” The demonstration of Proposition III includes a sub-proof of the proposition that “he who preserves me has within himself, either formally or eminently, whatever is in me”. Since God preserves the entire universe, it follows that everything is in him, either formally or eminently. While far from the radical Spinozistic view that God and the world are identical, the notion that everything in creation is also in God would seem to have its own unwelcome theological consequences, at least from a Cartesian point of view. In particular, it implies that extension, and hence divisibility, are in God. But, as Descartes himself cautions, “being divisible is an imperfection” and so completely foreign to God. (shrink)

RésuméDans sa présentation récente de la «dialectique de la création» dans la philosophie du XVIIe siècle, Thomas Lennon suggère que les hypothèses de Descartes concernant la causalité conduisent à un dilemme : Descartes doit accepter soit une certaine sorte d'émanationnisme panthéiste, soit l'émergence de la réalité ex. nihilo. Dans cet article, je défends en détail cette suggestion de Lennon. Au cœur de la question se trouve la notion cartesienne de la possession éminente. Si cette notion est interprétée dans ce que (...) j'appelle un sens «réaliste», ainsi que Descartes lui-mêmesemble l'avoir fait, alors il n'y a pas moyen d'éviter l'émanationnisme panthéiste. Si la possession est interprétée dans ce que j'appelle un sens «réductionniste», comme l'ont fait la plupart des commentateurs récents, alors le principe causal fundamental de Descartes se révèle soit arbitraire soit trivial. (shrink)

Descartes endorses the two prima facie inconsistent claims that sensory ideas are innate and caused in us by bodies. Most scholars believe that Claims A and B can be reconciled by appealing to the notion of occasional or triggering causation. I claim that this notion does not solve the theoretical problems it is introduced to solve and it generates additional difficulties. I argue that these difficulties result from conflating two questions that need to be kept distinct while inquiring about the (...) origin of ideas: the psychological question of the mechanisms by which we acquire ideas and the metaphysical question of how the content of these ideas is determined. I conclude by proposing a new way of reconciling Descartes's Claims A and B in light of this distinction. On my account, Descartes's very views on innateness explain why bodily states must be causes of sensory ideas. (shrink)

It is a common view that Descartes' causal principle is to be understood in light of a similarity condition that accounts for how finite causes contribute to an explanation of their effects. This paper challenges this common view and offers a sui generis reading of Descartes' views on causation that has also the advantage of solving the two exegetical issues of whether Descartes thought of the body-to-mind relation in occasionalist or causal terms and of whether Descartes regarded sensory ideas innate (...) or caused by bodies. (shrink)

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

Fidelity to the Cartesian philosophy requires a defense of dualism as well as mind-body union and interaction, all the while keeping to some form of the causal likeness principle. Each of these positions are ones that Descartes maintained throughout his writings. Yet, successors and scholars alike have noted the inconsistencies that arise from defending these views conjointly and have argued that one or more of them should be abandoned. Even the first generation of Cartesian successors whose fidelity to the Cartesian (...) principles was especially steadfast, such as Louis de la Forge, have been interpreted and characterized as giving up causal interactionism and wittingly or unwittingly embracing occasionalism. In my dissertation project, I have made mind-body not body-body cases the starting point of the inquiry into cartesian causal interactionism and from there developed a general model of interaction. This goes against the scholarly norm of focusing on the body-body cases to develop a model that then cannot explain how the mind-body cases work. This is not a minor change in point of view, but rather, requires a paradigm shift in cartesian studies, particularly with respect to understanding mind-body union and interaction. Further supporting the needed paradigm shift in our reading of La Forge is that in his account of union criteria we discover that mind-body union is the true union and that body-body unions are considered such only by extension. As such the case of mind-body union should be taken as the exemplar case and not body-body. According to La Forge, mind and body are linked via the relative attribute of will and share a relationship of mutual and reciprocal dependence. Union is not based on a spatial relation. The union is a hybrid mode – a way of being of the two substances if and when they stand in such a relation to one another. While, the union provides the commonality needed to bridge the gap of what two distinct substances have in common it does not provide the explanation of how mind and body interact. Operationalizing the union in terms of mutual and reciprocal dependence requires further explanation. La Forge explains that mind and body are secondary causes. The causal model of interaction of mind and body is one in which these particular causes and their relation of mutual and reciprocal dependence allows for the action of the one to bring about the effect in the other. The body’s movements stimulate thoughts in the mind and the mind’s thoughts direct movements in the body. There is a bi-directional causal interaction. Furthermore, by coupling La Forge’s account of union and interaction with that of Nadler’s proposed occasional causation model we find that mind and body both have causal agency in the weaker secondary sense. Both substances have the power to determine and direct motion, albeit neither mind nor body create motion per se. La Forge establishes a key distinction between universal and particular causes, which then grounds his subsequent attribution of secondary causal power to wills – to direct the movements of bodies, and to bodies in virtue of their modes of configuration – to direct the movement of other bodies. While, God is the universal and efficient cause that creates minds, bodies, and motion, He has minimal involvement in the particular determinations of volitions and movements. He imparts power to His creatures to determine motion. God conserves the world and the laws set by Him in the form of three laws of motion and seven laws of union. However, finite substances such as mind and body also have force, albeit not in the same sense as God does as the universal and total cause, but rather as particular secondary causes that have autonomy and can determine the direction and local quantity of motion. Thus, La Forge explains how both mind-body and body-body interactions are genuine causes, i.e., non-occasionalistic. Accordingly, in keeping with Cartesian philosophy La Forge maintains dualism, and provides an account of union and an account of interaction that is not occasionalistic. Both mind-body and body-body interaction is based on equivocal causation – the effect does not strictly resemble the cause – but both operate through the likenesses of relations of union, mutual dependence and proximity respectively. Thus, La Forge’s causal model that has minds and bodies interacting based on their relation of mutual and reciprocal dependence, and bodies interacting based on their shared mutual proximity and dependence, provides a weaker account of the causal likeness principle. Nonetheless, there is nothing inconsistent with his defense of a weaker notion of likeness that does not demand resemblance. My examination of La Forge’s Treatise on the Human Mind has demonstrated that we can maintain fidelity in our interpretation of Descartes and the Cartesian philosophy that maintains its adherence to dualism while giving an account of union and causal interaction. (shrink)

Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, regarded by many as his masterpiece, has been the subject of significant philosophical debate since its publication in 1641. Yet the Meditations is remarkable not only for its philosophical ideas but also for the style in which it was written. Two of the most notable stylistic elements of the Meditations are the use of temporal markers—a significant departure from analogous philosophical treatises of the same period—and the fact that the text is written in such a (...) way as to invite readers to subsume themselves into the role of the narrator, so as to experience its arguments for themselves. Many commentators have hinted at the importance of the narrator. But there has been little attempt at a sustained engagement. The function of the text as a series of days of meditation has also been insufficiently explored. In order to further investigate the roles of time and narrative within the Meditations, this thesis uses various reading methods provided by narrative theory, with particular focus on Monika Fludernik’s experiential model of narrative. Fludernik’s model allows for a clearer articulation of the role readers play in enacting meaning, and the way in which readers will in a sense “author” a text on their own terms. Reading the Meditations as an experiential narrative also illuminates significant issues to do with Descartes’s distinction between geometric and discursive argument, his conception of time, the specific expression of the Cogito in the Meditations, and the “reorientation” at the heart of the text—which I am calling a sort of conversion. The conversion at the heart of the Meditations will be explored in parallel with Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, two texts which—like the Meditations—can be thought of as experiential narratives designed to bring about some kind of conversion. I argue that such an experiential reading, drawing on the roles of time and narrative in the text, offers to enrich our understanding of the Meditations. (shrink)