Abstract

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..