Descartes is, for us, the father of modern philosophy, the figure with whom the history of our philosophy begins, the philosopher who ended scholasticism once and for all and turned aside the excesses of Renaissance thought. And the Discours de la méthode and Essais is the work in which Descartes seems to have declared his revolution, and announced to the world his independence from the history of philosophy. In the opening pages of his first published writing, Descartes wrote.

This chapter discusses Descartes thoughts on the seat of the soul or that part of the body which the soul is directly and intimately united. Descartes explains the simplicity principle: If the soul is simple, or indivisible, it can interact directly with only one object at once, thus indivisible. For example, if an animal's heart is taken and cut into pieces, the soul's indivisibility means that the soul cannot act directly upon the dissected parts of the heart. Descartes also consistently (...) identified the pineal gland as the seat of the soul— partly because it was mobile, durable, protected from outside influence, and accessible to the nerves. It also explains that the mind is not affected by all parts of the body, but only the brain and one small part of the brain only where a certain part of the brain is affected while other parts are doing other things. This chapter finally reveals that the simplicity principle of Descartes will have strong difficulties in the final analysis in relation to the truth of God. (shrink)

I consider two events in late seventeenth-century philosophy: the condemnation of Cartesianism by the church, the throne, and the university and the noncondemnation of Gassendism by the same powers. What is striking about the two events is that both Cartesians and Gassendists accepted the same proposition deemed heretical. Thus, what was sufficient to condemn Cartesianism was not sufficient to condemn Gassendism. As a result, I suggest that to understand what is involved in condemnation one has to pay close attention to (...) the intellectual and/or social context and to rhetorical strategy, not just to the propositions condemned. In this case, what is at stake are some of the central propositions of corpuscularianism and the mechanical philosophy. (shrink)