Abstract

Spirits and Clocks is the third in a series of magnificent books in which Dennis Des Chene explores the relationship between late Scholastic philosophy and Cartesian thought. The other two books are Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought and Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul . Together, these three books situate Descartes's thinking in one important aspect of the intellectual context within which it developed. The result is a superbly nuanced study of a thinker whose brilliance has often dazzled his modern commentators so much that they have forgotten he was addressing a philosophical tradition out of which many of his own concepts and arguments derived.In the present book Des Chene considers Descartes's physiological ideas, as presented in Traité de l'homme. He argues that Descartes's “rejection of the vegetative and sensitive souls invented by his predecessors was no less momentous for the science of life than the rejection of forms, powers, and ends was for physics. It was of a piece with his program in physics, executed with the same motives and resting on the same principles” . Spirits and Clocks is a careful, historically informed conceptual analysis of Descartes's notorious doctrine of the bête machine. Considering this idea in context highlights both the traditional and innovative features of Descartes's physiological thought. This book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of early modern natural philosophy by demonstrating both the continuities and discontinuities between the mechanical philosophy and Aristotelian natural philosophy.In the individual chapters Des Chene examines a few detailed examples of physiological questions that he considers particularly significant. These include the explanation of self‐motion, where machines come from, and the role of functional and teleological ideas in Descartes's physiology. Other important topics include sensation and perception, intentionality, and the unity of the body. In examining each of these issues, Des Chene first describes the explanations favored by sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Scholastic philosophers. He then provides a detailed analysis of Descartes's position and shows the precise differences and similarities between Descartes's thought and that of his contemporary Aristotelians. Both aspects of his discussion enrich our historical understanding. Des Chene is one of only a handful of scholars who have given serious attention to late Aristotelian natural philosophy in recent years, and his account in Spirits and Clocks is both informative and useful. Similarly, Traité de l'homme has received less scholarly attention than the Discourse on Method and the Meditations, so the present study is a welcome addition to the literature.Des Chene deploys an impressive array of scholarly skills and knowledge of Descartes's intellectual context as well as analytic precision. The result is an important and original reading of an aspect of Cartesianism that has not received as much attention as Descartes's physics, metaphysics, and epistemology. This book not only illuminates Descartes's theories but also delineates the conceptual commitments of the mechanical philosophy and the details of its differences from the late Scholasticism that it replaced. It serves as an excellent model for a contextualized history of early modern natural philosophy