Although Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy seems to be an especially theoretical work, this essay argues that reading the Meditations as a work of pure theory conceals an important dimensi...

I argue that Descartes intended the so-called ontological "argument" as a self-validating intuition, rather than as a formal proof. The textual evidence for this view is highly compelling, but the strongest support comes from understanding Descartes's diagnosis for why God's existence is not 'immediately' self-evident to everyone and the method of analysis that he develops for making it self-evident. The larger aim of the paper is to use the ontological argument as a case study of Descartes's nonformalist theory of deduction (...) and his method of analysis, showing how he conceives the latter as a form of philosophical therapy. (shrink)

R. C. Sleigh's Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentary on Their Correspondence is a very good book: it is detailed, clearly written, well argued and attentive to the historical background. The more I read it, the more I enjoyed it and the more I learned. Not only does it offer a wide variety of interesting points for the reader to agree and disagree with, it has, also, the virtue of pretty well forcing the reader to think about the issues involved and (...) their connection with a variety of other philosophical problems. It breaks a good deal of new ground and, as is the way with new ground-breaking, it sometimes only scratches the surface: it points out both the need for further, more detailed investigations and the way in which such investigations might fruitfully proceed. By and large, however, it does a great deal more than scratch the surface: its depth of discussion is such that only a comparably sized book could hope to discuss in all their ramifications the problems raised by Sleigh. (shrink)

Descartes understood the subject matter of physics (or natural philosophy) to encompass the whole of nature, including living things. It therefore comprised not only nonvital phenomena, including those we would now denominate as physical, chemical, minerological, magnetic, and atmospheric; it also extended to the world of plants and animals, including the human animal (with the exception of those aspects of the human mind that Descartes assigned to solely to thinking substance: pure intellect and will). Descartes wrote extensively on physiology and (...) on the physiology and psychology of the senses. This chapter examines the notions of *physiology* and *psychology* in medical and natural philosophical works of Descartes' day; follows his efforts to bring physiology into his mechanistic idiom; considers the relation between physiology of the animal machine and psychological functions that yield functionally appropriate behavior; goes into his physiology and psychology of vision; and elaborates the tension in Descartes' works between his metaphysically supported micro-corpuscularism and his discussion of the animal machine as an organic unity comprising various functionally and teleologically characterized systems. The chapter draws on Descartes' works in both metaphysics and natural philosophy, including his Treatise on Man (originally published as L'Homme, 1664). (shrink)