Jean-Luc Marion, in his latest book, “Sur la pensée passive de Descartes,” recently published in an English translation, challenges something he refers to, in the English subtitle, as “the Myth of Cartesian Dualism” and counters it with his original interpretation of Descartes’ notion of meum corpus. This article explores the reasons he adduces for this purpose. The case is made that Marion fails to provide sufficiently solid argumentative and textual support for his construal in this respect and that traditional substance (...) dualistic interpretative resources allow for a more straightforward and systematic reading. It is argued that Marion’s central dualism-deflecting claim, that in the Meditations, “my body” is not an extended thing but a mode of thought, is undermined by an analysis that carefully considers the context of those Descartes’ statements to which Marion appeals. (shrink)

Descartes notoriously characterizes substance in two ways: first, as an ultimate subject of properties ; second, as an independent entity. The characterizations have appeared to many to diverge on the definition as well as the scope of the notion of substance. For it is often thought that the ultimate subject of properties need not—and, in some cases, cannot—be independent. Drawing on a suite of historical, textual, and philosophical considerations, this essay argues for an interpretation that reconciles Descartes's two characterizations. It (...) proposes that both characterizations invoke a type of independence that obtains just in case there is no relation to another entity that holds by the nature of the entity in question. Even though the ultimate subject of properties is sometimes not independent in other respects, it satisfies this independence-by-nature condition. (shrink)

In their book on Descartes’s changing mind, Peter Machamer and J.E McGuire argue that Descartes discarded dualism to embrace a kind of monism. It is intriguing to investigate if the master of dualism could have changed his mind about the central aspect of his system. After reviewing the position of the authors, we will consider how and in what terms Descartes did not go back on his favorite doctrine but may have fooled himself about the nature of his dualism. It (...) is my contention that the so-called problematic Cartesian dualism has its origin in the lack of proper definition of mind and body as substances and the role of their respective attributes, thought and extension in the definition of the substances. The main answer to Machamer and McGuire’s thesis is that Descartes could develop his epistemology of mind and body independently of a metaphysics of substance and its attributes. In other words not only did Descartes not change his mind, but he persevered and enriched his dualist metaphysics. The subsidiary answer to the authors is that the concessions given by Descartes to the opponents of his dualism can be found in earlier works, but, pace the authors, they did not cause him not to develop his dualism in the first place. (shrink)