Descartes’s Moral Theory is designed “to introduce Descartes’s moral thought to an anglophone audience”. Divided into an introduction and three parts—“The Morality of the Discourse,” “Descartes’s Final Morality,” and “Value and Generosity”— the work presents Descartes as an original moral thinker who displayed a depth of thought and an appreciation of important theoretical issues significant enough to warrant a thorough consideration of his ethical views.

Laurence Renault has written a noteworthy book. In 1975 Jean-Luc Marion made sense of Descartes’s first work, the Regulae ad Directionem ingenii, by exploring the text as an appropriation and reinterpretation of Aristotelian theses concerning science and being. In Descartes ou la félicité volontaire, Renault, a former student of Marion’s and now his colleague at the Sorbonne, brings the same hermeneutic to Descartes’s final work, Les Passions de l’âme, to show the implications of philosophy-become-epistemology for an understanding of man’s end (...) or happiness. Renault argues that, in his later correspondence as well as his work on the passions, Descartes was occupied with developing a conception of happiness that would be consistent with his reformulation of philosophy. While Descartes had previously appeared to subscribe to an Aristotelian notion of happiness as a contemplative theoretical activity, his later work evidences an appreciation of man’s happiness as founded on an act not of intellect, but of will. Descartes ou la félicité volontaire explores the subtle nuances of this change. (shrink)