La présente contribution montre l’importance nouvelle de la prise en compte des risques, en particulier en Europe. Si le principe de précaution est indispensable, son utilisation à tort et à travers dans le débat public pose questions. La crise sanitaire met ainsi la lumière sur la nécessité de mieux organiser la gouvernance de ce principe, y compris en associant davantage les citoyens.

The French jurist and courtier Géraud de Cordemoy (1622-1684) was one of the leading exponents of early Cartesianism. Although he felt closely connected to René Descartes' philosophy, he corrected it in some central points. Thus he advocates an atomistic phsics and a theory of causation known as Occasionalism, which Leibniz calls the System of Occasional Causes in the "New System". The volume contains selected central passages from Cordemoy's main philosophical writings, which are made accessible here for the first time (...) in a bilingual study edition. These are excerpts from the "Six Discussions on the Difference and Union of Body and Soul" from 1666, and a "Metaphysical Treatise" that appeared posthumously in 1691. (shrink)

Steven Nadler presents the first English translation of a seminal work in the history of early modern philosophy. Géraud de Cordemoy's Six Discourses on the Distinction Between the Soul and the Body offers an account of the mind and the body in a human being. Cordemoy is an unorthodox Cartesian who opts for an atomist conception of body and matter. In this groundbreaking treatise, he also presents one of the earliest arguments for an occasionalist account of causation, with God (...) serving as the true cause of bodily motions in the world and of ideas in the mind. Nadler also includes the first English translation of Cordemoy's short Treatises on Metaphysics, which were probably written soon after the Discourses, and extend his discussion of mind-body union with consideration of human freedom and happiness. The introduction provides a biographical and historical context for Cordemoy's work and a study of his main philosophical doctrines, including his influence on later thinkers. (shrink)

Die Studie untersucht die atomistische Abweichung Cordemoys von den Vorgaben der cartesischen Physik. Sie zeigt, dass sich Cordemoys Atomismus auf eine Metaphysik stutzt, die vorcartesischen Positionen ahnelt. Die im Rahmen dieser Metaphysik vertretene Theorie vom Wesen individueller Substanzen bildet ausserdem die Grundlage von Cordemoys occasionalistischer Kausallehre. Dabei wird der Occasionalismus als physikalisches Erklarungsmodell eingefuhrt und schliesslich auf den Bereich der leib-seelischen Interaktion angewandt. Die Studie verweist wiederholt auf Parallelen und Unterschiede in der Philosophie Cordemoys zu Descartes, Clauberg und Sorel. -/- (...) The study examines Cordemoy's atomistic deviation from the precepts of Cartesian physics. It shows that Cordemoy's atomism is based on a metaphysics that resembles pre-Cartesian positions. The theory of the essence of individual substances advocated within the framework of this metaphysics also forms the basis of Cordemoy's occasionalist theory of causation. Occasionalism is introduced as a physical model of explanation and finally applied to the field of body-soul interaction. The study repeatedly points to parallels and differences in Cordemoy's philosophy to Descartes, Clauberg and Sorel. (shrink)

Geraud de Cordemoy, 1600-1684 -- Clerselier, 1614-1684, and Rohault, 1620-1675 -- Louis de la Chambre, 1594-1669 -- Samuel Sorbière, 1615-1670 -- Louis de la Forge and the critique of substantial forms -- Cartesian doctrine and the animal soul -- Clauberg and the development of occasionalism -- Some historical steps towards parallelism -- Cartesian refutations of Spinoza -- Matter and scientific efficiency -- Man, Thomistic and Cartesian.

Among the French Cartesians of the second half of the seventeenth century, Géraud de Cordemoy stands out as the most radical. He was one of the first to argue that Cartesian metaphysics imply occasionalism, and he was alone in arguing that those same metaphysical commitments lead to atomism. This paper addresses the second of these positions. Following a discussion of what is taken to be the strongest version of his argument for atomism, consideration will turn to an objection against (...) Cordemoy, one that was raised in his own day by Gottfried Leibniz and more recently by Steven Nadler. The paper concludes with a response offered on Cordemoy's behalf. (shrink)

"The French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche popularized the doctrine of occasionalism in the late seventeenth century. Occasionalism is the thesis that God alone is the true cause of everything that happens in the world, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." This doctrine was originally developed in medieval Islamic theology, and was widely rejected in the works of Christian authors in medieval Europe. Yet despite its heterodoxy, occasionalism was revived starting in the 1660s by French and Dutch followers of the philosophy (...) of René Descartes. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing body of literature on Malebranche and occasionalism. There has also been new work on the Cartesian occasionalists before Malebranche - including Arnold Geulincx, Geraud de Cordemoy and Louis de la Forge. But to date there has not been a systematic, book-length study of the reasoning that led Cartesian thinkers to adopt occasionalism, and the relationship of their arguments to Descartes' own views. This book expands on recent scholarship, to provide the first comprehensive account of seventeenth century occasionalism. Part I contrasts occasionalism with a theory of divine providence developed by Thomas Aquinas, in response to medieval occasionalists; it shows that Descartes' philosophy is compatible with Aquinas' theory, on which God "concurs" in all the actions of created beings. Part 2 reconstructs the arguments of Cartesians - such as Cordemoy and a Forge - who used Cartesian physics to argue for occasionalism. Finally, it shows how Malebranche's case for occasionalism combines philosophical theology with Cartesian metaphysics and mechanistic science"--. (shrink)

En prenant appui sur des textes de Descartes et de philosophes post-cartésiens comme Géraud de Cordemoy, ou encore des théoriciens de Port-Royal, tels Lancelot, Arnauld et Nicole, nous nous intéressons au statut double et paradoxal que revêt la parole dans la philosophie classique, au moment où se construit la question de l’union psychophysique et où sont proposées diverses « réponses » à cette question, dans la perspective d’une conceptualisation nouvelle d’une identité humaine rendue problématique. Le paradoxe tient au fait (...) que l’activité de langage est d’abord manifestation de la pensée, indice publiquement observable ou témoignage extérieur de l’existence d’un esprit à l’origine des actes linguistiques, conformément à la théorie cartésienne à ce sujet ; mais la parole dénote aussi, dans la philosophie même de Descartes, une faculté spécifiquement humaine, propre au « vrai homme », en tant qu’il est indissolublement esprit et corps. Nous tentons de montrer que ce qui est en jeu dans les études brèves et éparses que Descartes consacre au langage, puis dans les développements ultérieurs de la Grammaire générale et raisonnée et de la Logique de Port-Royal, à travers la théorie du signe linguistique et de la signification, c’est la compréhension de la relation, nécessairement postulée et pourtant constamment renvoyée à l’ordre d’un lien contre-nature, et par là arbitraire, fruit d’une institution, entre la parole comme phénomène physique et la parole comme activité symbolique par excellence ; si bien que le prodige du phénomène humain du langage, comme expression publique des pensées, donne la mesure de l’énigme que constitue l’unité en l’homme du corps et de l’esprit. (shrink)

This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not (...) unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation. -/- In line with this general approach, this book features original essays written by leading experts in early modern philosophy. It is organized around five guiding questions: -/- What are the entities involved in causal processes leading to cognition? What type(s) or kind(s) of causality are at stake? Are early modern thinkers confined to efficient causation or do other types of causation play a role? What is God's role in causal processes leading to cognition? How do cognitive causal processes relate to other, non-cognitive causal processes? Is the causal process in the case of human cognition in any way special? How does it relate to processes involved in the case of non-human cognition? -/- The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics. (shrink)

Sandrine Roux's L'Empreinte cartésienne addresses what she describes as one of the "persistent problems" in philosophy, namely, the mind-body problem raised by Descartes's substance dualism. Her book carefully lays out the various puzzles, both real and perceived, raised by Descartes's theory of humans as a mind-body union. She distinguishes clearly between the way these problems are understood by Descartes, and the way they were seen by some of his seventeenth-century followers, especially the occasionalists, Louis de La Forge, Géraud de (...) Cordemoy, and Malebranche. And she tries to orient the Cartesian mind-body problem with respect to theories in contemporary philosophy of mind.The first two parts are... (shrink)

This article addresses some Late Scholastic accounts (Suárez, Abra de Raçonis, Gamaches, Ysambert, Arriaga), of the “problem of transduction” in angels, as a possible source for the genesis of early modern occasionalism, particularly La Forge’s and Cordemoy’s. Indeed, if the “problem of transduction” is a structural issue of all the Aristotelian gnoseology, the impossibility of interaction between immaterial and material substance concerns, more generally, all spiritual substances, posing the issue about the principle of "transduction" already at the level of angels, (...) entirely immaterial creatures, unable to any relationship with the bodies. In order to answer to this peculiar version of the 'problem of transduction' Late Scholastic elaborate doctrines that are direct antecedents of occasionalist ones, and which likely directly influenced early modern occasionalism. To follow this investigative path, I will intersect three complementary argumentative lines. First, I will focus on Late Scholastic angelology, to point out how the need to solve the 'problem of transduction' in this peculiar context pushes the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Schools to a proto-occasionalist conception of angelic innatism. Secondly, I will identify in the debate on the angelic locutio of the key places for the elaboration of a model that sees God as the only efficient cause and the only guarantor of the mind's communications and contents. Thirdly, I will stress how the Late Scholastic angelological debates could be an important source for early modern dualism and the seventeenth-century occasionalism, notably for La Forge and Cordemoy. -/- . (shrink)