I here address Descartes' account of human nature as a union of mind and body by appealing to The Passions of the Soul. I first show that Descartes takes us to be able to reform the naturally instituted associations between bodily and mental states. I go on to argue that Descartes offers a teleological explanation of body-mind associations (those instituted both by nature and by artifice). This explanation sheds light on the ontological status of the union. I suggest that it (...) affords a way of understanding how mind and body form a true unit without compromising Descartes' dualism. (shrink)

The concept of mechanism is analyzed in terms of entities and activities, organized such that they are productive of regular changes. Examples show how mechanisms work in neurobiology and molecular biology. Thinking in terms of mechanisms provides a new framework for addressing many traditional philosophical issues: causality, laws, explanation, reduction, and scientific change.

In her first book, Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism.

As a practicing life scientist, Descartes must have a theory of what it means to be a living being. In this paper, I provide an account of what his theoretical conception of living bodies must be. I then show that this conception might well run afoul of his rejection of final causal explanations in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, I show how Descartes might have made use of such explanations as merely hypothetical, even though he explicitly blocks this move. I conclude by (...) suggesting that there is no reason for him to have blocked the use of hypothetical final causes in this way. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes is not a reductionist about life, but dissolves or eliminates the category entirely. This is surprising both because he repeatedly refers to the life of humans, animals, and plants and because he appears to rely on the category of life to construct his physiology and medicine. Various attempts have been made in the scholarship to attribute a principled concept of life to Descartes. Most recently, Detlefsen has argued that Descartes “is a reductionist with respect to explanation (...) of life phenomena but not an eliminativist with respect to life itself”. I show that all these attempts either result in arbitrariness or force Descartes's wider philosophical project into incoherence. I argue that Descartes's ontological commitments make a principled concept of life impossible, that he does not need such a concept, and that his project ends up more coherent without one. (shrink)

This major new study of Descartes explores a number of key issues, including his use of experience and reason in science; the metaphysical foundations of Cartesian science; the Cartesian concept of explanation and proof; and an empiricist interpretation of the _Regulae_ and the _Discourse_. Dr. Clarke argues that labels such as empiricism and rationalism are useless for understanding Descartes because, at least in his scientific methodology, he is very much an Aristotelian for whom reflection on ordinary experience is the primary (...) source of scientific hypotheses. Descartes traditionally has been presented as a classic example of rationalism in science, especially by philosophers who concentrated their attention on the _Meditations_ or the _Discourse_. A different perspective is gained by reading Descartes as a practicing scientist and by examining his scientific work and correspondence with other seventeenth-century scientists. These texts suggest that the author relies very much on experience, and in some cases on scientific experiments to support his theories or to dispute those of others. Descartes scientific practice is even consistent with a less rationalistic interpretation of the _Regulae_ and the _Discourse_ than is normally defended. (shrink)

rené descartes famously and explicitly rejects appeals to final causes in natural philosophy, suggesting that such appeals depend on knowledge of God’s inscrutable ends.For since I now know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the whole kind of causes, customarily sought from (...) an end, to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating God’s ends.1This rejection did not go unnoticed nor without controversy. In the Fifth.. (shrink)

In Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes Thomas Fuchs discusses the similarities and differences of the views of the two seventeenth-century scholars William Harvey and Rene Descartes on the beart and circulationof the blood; Fuch traces the reception of the two views in the medical literature of the time and the influence both views had. In Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes Thomas Fuchs begins by comparing the views of William Harvey [1578-1657] and Rene Descartes [1596-1650] on the (...) heart and the circulation of the blood through the body. These two seventeenth-century scholars -- one a British medical doctor, the other a French philosopher and mathemetician -- differed substantially in their beliefs: they both accepted the idea of circulation of the blood, but differed on the action of the heart. Fuchs traces the ways the opposing views were received, revised, rejected, or renewed in succeeding generations by medical writers in various parts of Europe. He then examines Harvey's approach to cardiac and circulatory physiology, mainly through an examination of Harvey's book De motu cordis: he follows with a discussion of the background in Aristotelian philosophy that was the requirement for all studies in medicineand how that affected Harvey's beliefs. Fuchs then turns to Descartes's presentation of Harvey's views and shows how his view, rather than Harvey's, was accepted in Europe at that time. Marjorie Grene brings to the translation herdistinguished background in philosophy and her keen insights into medical philosophy. Thomas Fuchs teaches psychiatry at the Rupert-Karls-Universitat, Heidelberg. MarjorieGrene is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California at Davis, and Adjunct Professor and Honorary Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Tech University. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Descartes's Novel Conception of the Mind Dualism, Substances, and Principal Attributes Thinking Without a Body Principal Attributes and the Nature of Body Conclusion References and Further Reading.

. The concept of bodily health is problematic for mechanists like Descartes, as it seems that they need to appeal to something extrinsic to a machine, i.e., its purpose, to determine whether the machine is working well or badly, and so healthy or unhealthy. I take issue with this claim. By drawing on the history of medicine, I suggest that in the seventeenth century there was space for a non-teleological account of health. I further argue that mechanists can and did (...) appeal to structural integrity, as a non-teleological notion of form, to ground the norms required for ascriptions of health. (shrink)

Despite eschewing the utility of ends or purposes in natural philosophy, Descartes frequently engages in functional explanation, which many have assumed is an essentially teleological form of explanation. This article considers the consistency of Descartes's appeal to natural functions, advancing the idea that he is utilizing a non-normative, non-teleological form of functional explanation. It will be argued that Cartesian functional analysis resembles modern causal functional analysis, and yet, by emphasizing the interdependency of parts of biological systems, is able to avoid (...) many of the problems attendant upon modern causal theories. It is for this reason, if no other, that the study of Descartes's natural philosophy should be of interest to contemporary theorists of functional analysis. (shrink)

Finally, he looks at,the various kinds of unity of the body, both in itself and in its union with the soul.Spirits and Clocks continues Des Chene's highly ...

ONE Introduction Rene Descartes is, in many ways, a victim of his own success as a philosopher. He notoriously wrote a small number of readily accessible, ...

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)

The volume touches upon many topics and themes shared by Cartesian and late scholastic philosophy: matter and form; infinity, place, time, void, and motion; the ...

Despite holding to the essential distinction between mind and body, Descartes did not adopt a life-body dualism. Though humans are the only creatures which can reason, as they are the only creatures whose body is in an intimate union with a soul, they are not the only finite beings who are alive. In the present note, I attempt to determine Descartes'' criteria for something to be ''living.'' Though certain passages associate such a principle with the presence of a properly functioning (...) heart, I show that there are important reasons for also understanding life in terms of a degree of complexity of design. (shrink)

In this paper I address Descartes’ use of analogy in physics. First, I introduce Descartes’ hypothetical reasoning, distinguishing between analogy and hypothesis. Second, I examine in detail Descartes’ use of analogy to both discover causes and add plausibility to his hypotheses—even though not always explicitly stated, Descartes’ practice assumes a unified view of the subject matter of physics as the extension of bodies in terms of their size, shape and the motion of their parts. Third, I present Descartes’ unique “philosophy (...) of analogy”, where the absence of analogy serves as a criterion for falsifying proposed explanations in physics. I conclude by defending Descartes’ philosophy of analogy by appeal to the value scientists assign to simplicity in their explanations. (shrink)

Bien qu'il n'y ait consacre aucun ouvrage, Descartes s'interessait a la chimie de son temps, qui s'appelait aussi alchimie. On a souvent oublie cet aspect de ses recherches scientifiques, alors que les questions de chimie trouvent leur place dans Les meteores de 1637 et constituent l'essentiel de la quatrieme partie des Principes de la philosophie. Pour autant, loin de vouloir donner a la chimie le statut d'une science comparable a la mecanique ou a la medecine, Descartes s'est plutot employe a (...) reduire les operations de la chimie a celles de la mecanique, contestant ainsi la specificite des operations et des concepts de la chimie de son temps. Le systeme cartesien ne pouvait en effet se satisfaire ni des esprits de la chimie, au statut ambigu entre matiere et pensee, ni des principes paracelsiens, Mercure, Soufre et Sel, qui n'avaient d'autre consistance que les proprietes sensibles qu'ils manifestaient. Se pose alors la question de la possibilite d'une chimie cartesienne. Le corpuscularisme de chimistes comme Robert Boyle ou Nicolas Lemery s'inspire davantage de la tradition alchimique et des recherches chimiques de l'epoque que du cartesianisme. C'est en defendant son autonomie a l'egard de la physique et de la medecine que la chimie a pu se developper dans la seconde partie du XVIIe siecle et au XVIIIe siecle, en se presentant comme une science empirique se defiant de tout presuppose metaphysique. L'influence cartesienne semble alors s'evanouir au fur et a mesure que se developpe la chimie. (shrink)