Bei den korpuskulartheoretischen Erklärungen von Naturphänomenen, wie sie Descartes in den Principia philosophiae vornimmt und im Discours de la methode anspricht, lassen sich zwei verschiedene und nur teilweise miteinander vereinbare Bedeutungsgruppen des Hypothesenbegriffs nachweisen. Sie verbinden sich mit unterschiedlichen Bewertungen des Status von Hypothesen im wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisprozeß. Einerseits findet man eine Verwandtschaft zum heute wissenschaftstheoretisch verbreiteten Verständnis von Hypothesen als positivem und integralem Bestandteil der Naturerkenntnis. Typischer für Descartes' Naturphilosophie ist jedoch die andererseits von ihm vertretene Vorstellung, daß der Umfang (...) des bloß hypothetischen Wissens im Fortgang der Naturerkenntnis zu minimieren sei. Mit dieser Forderung erweist sich Descartes als Vertreter einer neuzeitlichen Wissenschaftsauffassung, die deutlich vom modernen Verzicht auf ein ausschließlich geltendes System der Naturerkenntnis abgehoben ist. (shrink)

Descartes maintained that sensations of color and the like misrepresent the material world in normal circumstances. Some prominent scholars have argued that, to explain this Cartesian view, we must attribute to Descartes a causal account of sensory representation. I contend that neither the arguments motivating this reading nor the textual evidence offered in its support is sufficient to justify such attribution. Both textual and theoretical reasons point in the direction of an (at least partial) internalist account of Descartes' views on (...) sensory representation. (shrink)

This paper presents a new approach to resolving an apparent tension in Descartes’ discussion of scientific theories and explanations in the Principles of Philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes repeatedly claims that any theories presented in science must be certain and indubitable. On the other hand, Descartes himself presents an astonishing number of speculative explanations of various scientific phenomena. In response to this tension, commentators have suggested that Descartes changed his mind about scientific theories having to be certain and indubitable, (...) that he lacked the conceptual resources to describe the appropriate epistemic attitude towards speculative theories, or that the presence of geometrical principles in these explanations guarantee their certainty. I argue that none of these responses is satisfactory and suggest a different resolution to the tension by examining Descartes’ notion of explanation. On Descartes’ view, providing an adequate explanation does not require being certain of the theories that constitute the explanans. Relatedly, the purpose of Cartesian explanations is not to discover the truth about the various underlying mechanisms that such explanations appeal to, but to support his general philosophical thesis that all natural phenomena can be explained by appealing to the extension of matter. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The analytic method by which Descartes established the first principle of his philosophy is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and non-logical inference that differs markedly from the deductive model of noetic apprehension long associated with seventeenth-century rationalism. In this paper, it is shown that the same analytic process is at work in the Third Meditation proof of the innateness of the idea of God, where, however, there are serious doubts about its legitimacy.

The ArgumentIn this paper it will be shown that Newton'sPrincipiagives an explication of and an argument for the first Law of Motion, that seems to be outside the scope of today's philosophy of science but was familiar to seventeenth-century commentators: The foundation of classical mechanics is possible only by recurrence to results of a successful technical practice. Laws of classical mechanics gain their meaning as well as their claims to validity only when considered as statements about artifacts whose production belongs (...) to the shared know-how of a scientific community. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the relation between Descartes' psychology of vision and the cognitive science approach to psychology (henceforth CS). In particular, I examine Descartes' the Optics (1637) in the light of David Marr's (1982) position in CS. My general claim is that CS can be seen as a rediscovery of Descartes' psychology of vision. In the first section, I point to a parallel between Descartes' epistemological revolution, which created the modem version of the problem of perception, and the (...) cognitive revolution. These fundamental revolutions in theoretical psychology were both inspired and legitimated by a revolution in mathematics. They took place in accordance with one of Marr's maxims: “To the desirable via the possible”. In the second section, I demonstrate that in the Optics, Descartes explains perception of metrical properties in a way that — on a detailed level — is in accordance with how Man argues that complex information processing systems have to be explained: both Descartes and Man emphasize the co-ordination of logical and physical analysis. In the third section, I claim that Descartes' arguments for a sharp distinction between mechanical transmission of sense data (sensation) and non-mechanical inferences on those sense data (thinking) are sound arguments seen from Man's position in CS. Descartes' arguments are based on his logical and physical analysis. Malebranche's radicalized version of Cartesian dualism turns Descartes' empirically-based assumption that mechanisms cannot realize inferences into a metaphysical assumption. In the final section, I argue that this metaphysical assumption contributes to an understanding of perception as a non-symbolic, non-inferential bottom-up process in mainstream monistic and mechanistic scientific psychology until the cognitive revolution. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes explains physiology in terms of whole systems, and not in terms of the size, shape and motion of tiny corpuscles (corpuscular mechanics). It is a standard, entrenched view that Descartes’ proper means of explanation in the natural world is through strict reduction to corpuscular mechanics. This view is bolstered by a handful of corpuscular–mechanical explanations in Descartes’ physics, which have been taken to be representative of his treatment of all natural phenomena. However, Descartes’ explanations of the (...) ‘principal parts’ of physiology do not follow the corpuscular–mechanical pattern. Des Chene has identified systems in Descartes’ account of physiology, but takes them ultimately to reduce down to the corpuscle level. I argue that they do not. Rather, Descartes maintains entire systems, with components selected from multiple levels of organization, in order to construct more complete explanations than corpuscular mechanics alone would allow. (shrink)

At various points in his work on physiology and medicine, Descartes refers to a “principle of life.” The exact term changes—sometimes, it is the “principle of movement and life”, sometimes the “principle underlying all [the] functions” of the body —but the message seems consistent: the phenomena of living bodies are the product of a single, underlying principle. That principle is generally taken to be cardiac heat.1 The literature has, quite reasonably, taken this message at face value. Thus, Shapiro: “Descartes insists (...) again and again that the human body is properly to be described as a machine whose workings are […] driven by the heat in the heart that... (shrink)

This journal article has been superseded by a revised version, published in the collection _Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes_, ed. by Stephen Voss (Oxford University Press, 1993), 259–287.

Essay review of Daniel Garber, 1992, Descartes' Metaphysical Physics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, xiv + 389 pp., and Michael Friedman,: 1992, Kant and the Exact Sciences, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, xvii + 357 pp. These two books display the historical connection between science and philosophy in the writings of Descartes and Kant. They show the place of science in, or the scientific context of, these authors' central metaphysical doctrines, pertaining to substance and its properties, (...) the metaphysics of force and causal agency, the relation of geometry to matter and to space, and the structure of cognition. In so doing, they provide an image of philosophy as an intellectually and culturally engaged enterprise, an image according to which it makes little sense to make pronouncements about the foundations of knowledge or the possibilities for science without direct engagement with the living practice of scientific and other cognitive enterprises. However, in some areas they did not engage the context as fully as needed; their interpretations of particular arguments and indeed of whole philosophical programs suffered thereby. (shrink)

Recent Cartesian scholarship postulates two Descartes, separating Descartes into a scientist and a metaphysician. The purpose varies, but one has been to show that the metaphysical Descartes, of the Meditations, is less genuine than the scientific Descartes. Accordingly, discussion of God and the soul, the evil demon, and the non-deceiving God were elements of rhetorical strategy to please theologians, not of serious philosophical argumentation. I agree in finding two Descartes, but the two I identify are not scientist and philosopher, but (...) practitioner and methodologist of the mathematical sciences on the one hand, and metaphysician of a new, general science of nature on the other. This chapter examines the transition to the second Descartes, and especially the metaphysical turn. It proposes that although Descartes' doubt was methodological and he felt no serious threat from skepticism and absolute certainty was not his primary goal. Rather, the doubt was used to reform the intellect, or to teach the use of the pure intellect (and to obtain certainty in that domain). Further, Descartes' metaphysics was primarily in the service of his natural philosophy (where in the main he did not claim absolute certainty). He did not talk about God and the soul in order to fool the theologians. His discussion of the relation between God and human reason was part of a metaphysical strategy in which, through his doctrine on the eternal truths, he separated knowledge of the first principles of natural philosophy (gained by the natural light) from theological cognition (through the light of grace), thereby seeking to render his metaphysics distinct from the proper domain of theology. (shrink)

: This paper presents a detailed account of Descartes' derivation of his second law of nature—the law of rectilinear motion—from a priori metaphysical principles. Unlike the other laws the proof of the second depends essentially on a metaphysical assumption about the temporal immediacy of God's operation. Recent commentators (e.g., Des Chene and Garber) have not adequately explained the precise role of this assumption in the proof and Descartes' reasoning has continued to seem somewhat arbitrary as a result. My account better (...) reveals the dependence of the second law on fundamental principles about time and causality. (shrink)

The philosophy of science community mourns the loss of Margaret Catherine Morrison, who passed away on January 9, 2021, after a long battle with cancer. Margie, as she was known to all who knew her, was highly regarded for her influential contributions to the philosophy of science, particularly her studies of the role of models and simulations in the natural and social sciences. These contributions made her a world-leading philosopher of science, instrumental in shifting philosophers' attention from the structure of (...) scientific theories to the practice of science. Her sophisticated studies of the function of models in scientific practice drew on detailed knowledge of the theories and experiments of physics as well as the history of physics. In emphasizing the autonomy of scientific models and their interventional character, her insights had some affinity with Cartwright's and Hacking’s views on phenomenological laws, entity realism, the instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theories, and the disunity of science. But Morrison’s approach was distinguished by the conviction that the existence of unobservable entities cannot be defended independently of the theories that support their evidence, and that scientific practice cannot be adequately understood without examining the reasons for theory unification. (shrink)

In this article I dispute the claim, made by several contemporary scholars, that Spinoza was a naturalist. ‘Naturalism’ here refers to two distinct but related positions in contemporary philosophy. The first, ontological naturalism, is the view that everything that exists possesses a certain character permitting it to be defined as natural and prohibiting it from being defined as supernatural. I argue that the only definition of ontological naturalism that could be legitimately applied to Spinoza's philosophy is so unrestrictive as to (...) tell us nothing about the content of his ideas. The second, methodological naturalism, is the view that the natural sciences are the best means of finding out substantial truths about the concrete world. I present some historical research showing that Spinoza's way of positioning himself with respect to other philosophers in the Dutch Republic casts very serious doubt on the claim that he was a methodological naturalist. This adds further weight to arguments that have already been made against the naturalist reading of Spinoza. (shrink)

In 1675, Burchard de Volder (1643–1709) was the first professor to introduce the demonstration of experiment into a university physics course and built the Leiden Physics Theatre to accommodate this new pedagogy. When he requested the funds from the university to build the facility, he claimed that the performance of experiments would demonstrate the “truth and certainty” of the postulates of theoretical physics. Such a claim is interesting given de Volder’s lifelong commitment to Cartesian scientia. This chapter will examine de (...) Volder’s views on experiment and show that they are not Newtonian or inductivist, as is sometimes claimed. While de Volder thinks we need deductive reasoning from first principles to provide evidence of the certainty of the content of our physical theories, he also contends that we need experiment to provide evidence of the certainty of the existence of the particular bodies those theories discuss. This approach to experiment is based on a distinction between rational certainty and the certainty of material bodies in the actual world. While this account is deeply influenced by Descartes, it is importantly different than Descartes’ distinction between absolute and moral certainty. De Volder’s “Cartesian Empiricism” is best understood as a continuation and further development of a long tradition of teaching through observation at Leiden. (shrink)

Descartes is usually taken to be a strict reductionist, and he frequently describes his work in reductionist terms. This dissertation, however, makes the case that he is a nonreductionist in certain areas of his philosophy and natural philosophy. This might seem like simple inconsistency, or a mismatch between Descartes's ambitions and his achievements. I argue that here it is more than that: nonreductionism is compatible with his wider commitments, and allowing for irreducibles increases the explanatory power of his system. Moreover, (...) Descartes depends on nonreductionist knowledge and on irreducibles in order to maintain his epistemology and metaphysics. That is, there is more in the Cartesian world than mind, matter, and God. (shrink)