Abstract

With Spirits and Clocks, Dennis Des Chene completes a two-part project begun with Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul. In both volumes, Des Chene is concerned with the question of what makes living things living. For the Jesuit Aristotelians, the answer requires a complex analysis of the ontology of soul and power. For Descartes, of course, the answer is completely different; arguably, there is a sense in which his answer is: nothing. Indeed Des Chene does argue this, concluding that for Descartes there are no living things in the Aristotelian sense: the body machine does not live, because it has no powers; the soul does not live because it has no role in nutrition, growth, and generation. Descartes’s physiology thus represents the most radical aspect of his natural philosophy, for he must eliminate souls from living things as part of the general project of eliminating Aristotelian forms from nature. As such, the importance of Descartes’s physiology is manifest; Des Chene’s study is a very welcome and original addition to the still-modest philosophical literature engaged with Descartes’sL’Homme and La description du corps humain.