In this work I argue that Descartes was not a trialist by showing that the main tenets of trialist interpretations of Descartes's theory of substance are either not supported by the text or are not sufficient for establishing the trialist interpretation.

In a 1669 letter to his mentor Thomasius, Leibniz writes that "hardly any of the Cartesians have added anything to the discoveries of their master" insofar as they "have published only paraphrases of their leader."1 The book that is the focus of my remarks here—Roger Ariew's Descartes and the First Cartesians —shows that Leibniz was most certainly incorrect. In particular, Ariew draws attention to the fact that there was a concerted effort to present a new sort of Cartesianism that conforms (...) to the structure of the early modern French scholastic curriculum. Though this effort was inspired by Descartes's own attempt to present his views in this manner, the later "Cartesian scholasticism"... (shrink)

Roger Ariew's new book, Descartes and the First Cartesians, will not be a methodological surprise for those who already read his previous work, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, as well as its expanded version, Descartes Among the Scholastics. Right at the beginning of DAS, Ariew justified the title of this book in the following way: A philosophical system cannot be studied adequately apart from the intellectual context in which it is situated. Philosophers do not usually utter propositions in a vacuum, (...) but accept, modify or reject doctrines whose meaning and significance are given in a particular culture. Thus Cartesian philosophy should... (shrink)

Descartes croyait que le monde étendu ne se terminait pas par une borne, mais pourquoi? Après avoir expliqué la position de Descartes au §1, en suggérant que sa conception de l’étendue indéfinie de l’univers devrait être entendue comme actuelle, mais syncatégorématique, nous nous penchons sur son argument dans le §2 : toute postulation d’une surface extérieure au monde sera autodestructrice, parce que la simple contemplation d’une telle borne nous conduira à reconnaître l’existence d’une étendue allant au-delà. Au §3, nous identifions (...) l’hypothèse fondamentale qui sous-tend cet argument en comparant les conceptions respectives de Descartes et de Malebranche quant au statut ontologique des modes de l’étendue. (shrink)

Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents (...) and subjects, and are what exist in the most proper sense of the term. We believe, in other words, in substances. (shrink)

Resumen Husserl emprendió varias presentaciones sintéticas de la fenomenología con el propósito de darla a conocer ante públicos amplios. En el presente trabajo estudiaremos el enfoque de las Conferencias de París, su proyección en las Meditaciones cartesianas y el destino del proyecto de la versión alemana en tensión con la redacción del Sistema de filosofía fenomenológica, a los efectos de establecer sus rasgos distintivos, evaluar los alcances del abandono del neocartesianismo, que suele asociarse con el último período de producción de (...) Husserl y, situar la dirección de estas últimas presentaciones en el clima intelectual que les dio origen.Husserl undertooks several synthetic presentations of phenomenology in order to make it known to broader audiences. In the present work we will study the approach of the Paris Lectures, their projection in the Cartesian Meditations and the idea of the German version in tension with the writing of the System of phenomenological philosophy, in order to establish its distinctive features, to evaluate the abandonment of neocartesianism that is usually associated with the last period of Husserl's production and to identify the direction of these presentations in the intellectual climate that gave rise to them. (shrink)

In his recent survey of the “dialectic of creation” in seventeenth-century philosophy, Thomas Lennon has suggested that Descartes’s assumptions about causality encourage a kind of “pantheistic emanationism”. Lennon notes that Descartes regularly invokes the principle that there is nothing in the effect which was not previously present, either formally or eminently, in the cause. Descartes also believes that God is the continuous, total, and efficient cause of everything. From these assumptions it should follow that everything that exists in the created (...) world is previously present in God. Indeed, Descartes embraces the emanationist doctrine explicitly when, at the end of his replies to the Second Set of Objections, he arranges the arguments of the Meditations in “geometrical fashion.” The demonstration of Proposition III includes a sub-proof of the proposition that “he who preserves me has within himself, either formally or eminently, whatever is in me”. Since God preserves the entire universe, it follows that everything is in him, either formally or eminently. While far from the radical Spinozistic view that God and the world are identical, the notion that everything in creation is also in God would seem to have its own unwelcome theological consequences, at least from a Cartesian point of view. In particular, it implies that extension, and hence divisibility, are in God. But, as Descartes himself cautions, “being divisible is an imperfection” and so completely foreign to God. (shrink)

This paper investigates the little-known reception of Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke in the Scottish universities in the period 1660–1700. The fortune of the English philosophers in the Scottish universities rested on whether their philosophies were consonant with the Scots’ own philosophical agenda. Within the established Cartesian curriculum, the Scottish regents eagerly taught what they thought best in English philosophy and criticised what they thought wrong. The paper also suggests new sources and (...) perspectives for the broader discussion of the ‘origins’ of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

The much-welcomed recent acknowledgement that there is a plurality of philosophical traditions has an important consequence: that we must acknowledge too that there are many philosophical modernities. Modernity, I will claim, is a polycentric notion, and I will substantiate my claim by examining in some detail one particular non-western philosophical modernity, a remarkable period in 16th to 17th century India where a diversity of philosophical projects fully deserve the label.

The title Descartes and the First Cartesians only partly reflects the scope of the research presented in Roger Ariew's latest book. To be sure, this study does offer a new and extensive account of the work of the first Cartesians and thus a new perspective on the historical phenomenon that was seventeenth century Cartesianism. Yet it does so on the basis of a vast survey of the Scholastic context from which the new philosophy emerged. The investigation of Cartesianism is thus (...) given shape by the inquiry into Scholasticism. From this point of view, Descartes and the First Cartesians takes up and completes the research Ariew presented in... (shrink)

I am grateful that a set of fine scholars would be willing to reflect upon and write about Descartes and the First Cartesians. Their efforts are greatly appreciated and, on the whole, their observations are sound. It should be evident that I do not consider the work to be the final word on the subject of Descartes and Cartesians, that is, something exhaustive of it or complete for any of its topics. In fact, every time I reconsider an issue from (...) my book, I find that there is more to be said even in respect to what I wrote about in great detail. I will reply to the commentators in the following order: 1. Domenico Collacciani; 2. Lucian Petrescu; 3. Martine... (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)