DesChenes On Descartes

Well, here's all the mentions of Descartes in the first 113 pages. I'll comment on why I found this interesting later tonight.

1. Page (vii): "The second part, Spirits and Clocks , takes the story into the seventeenth century,and studies life and organic unity in Descartes and other representatives of the new science." "My reflectionson Descartes' physiology and its antecedents began long ago."
2. Page 3: He includes Eustachius in his authors, because of his importance to Descartes. "It is againstthe backgropund of their version of Aristotle and their summaries of the tradition that works likeDescartes' Traite de l'Homme , Malebranche's Recherche de la Verite , and Gassendi's Syntagma should be read.
3. Page 5: The "divorce of the vegetative soul and its functions from the sensitive and rational souls" was "effected by Descartes: one of the principal characteristics of the human machine is that it differsonly in the degree of its complexity from the fountains and clocks that we ourselves construct. Those, as everyonewould have agreed, are not alive; therefore enither is the human body. The operations of the Cartesian soulhave no intrinsic relation to nourishment, growth, or reproduction. Its sensations and passions are, Descartes believes, `instituted' by God so as to provide a guide to life."
4. Page 8: "Descartes, like his predecessors, held that a thing could be present in various locations of extended space withoutitself being extended." "The traditonal slogan, echoed by Descartes in the Passions of the Soul , would have itthat `the whole soul is in the whole body and wholly in each part.'"
5. Page 12: "That sense of continuity between the lower and higher operations of life accounts for the attraction of philosophers, wary now both of `Cartesian' dualism and of the more straightforward forms of materialism, to a refurbishedAristotelian psychology. Freed of Cartesian (and Christian) excrescences, Aristotle seems to offer a middle way, acknowledging(for the most part) the materiality of the soul but refusing to reduce it to physical properties. My aim is to exhibit somethemes from the scientia de anima just prior to the Cartesian turn. Where living things in general are concerned, the fate of that science is easy enough to summarize. Animal souls are banished. With them gomost of the standard quaestiones about the soul: whether it is identical with its powers, how it can be immortal whenits vegetative and sensitive parts are not, and so on. Old questions take a new turn: life must be redefined, the unity of the organism--if indeed it has any--reargued. Decartes' animal-machine, perhaps the most influential image of the livingin the new science, has no life. As a configuration of vast numbers of extended substances, it has no intrinsic unity. Like artifactsas Aristotelians conceive them, and not incidentally, it lacks a form or principle to unify its parts and powers."
6. Page 13: "In the uncompromising physiology of Descartes, the very idea of a natural division between the living and the nonliving becomes obscure. It is not so much that Descartes must deny that living things live, if by that one means that ion a suitable sense they are self-movers." "Through at least two and a half centuries, vital principles, forces, entelechies, and so on took up the slack left by physics and chemistry. Aristotelianism in the form confronted by Descartes was notrevived, though the doctrines of De Anima found echoes, for example, in thework of Hans Driesch."
7. Page 14: "In psychology, as I have mentioned, Aristotle--a more Averroist Aristotle than would have beenacceptable to Descartes' teachers--has returned, as inspiration if not as source. Nevertheless there can be no return to Aristotelianism pur sang because, as Burnyeat says, there can be no return to Aristoteliannatural philosophy. The obscolescence of Descartes' physics and physiology does not alter that judgement: the changes he helped bring about are irreversible." "The science propounded in the hundreds of De Anima commentaries published between 1550 and 1750, was the biology and psychology against which Descartes,Hobbes, Gassendit, and their contemporaries set their new philosophies."
8. Pages 19-20: "The data of the scientia de anima , the topic of this chapter and the next, are asvarious as its objects. They include, first, the knowledge of the habits and forms of plants, animals, and peoplethat comes from everyday experience, or is attested by creditable observers--including authoritative texts likethose of Pliny and Aristotle himself. They knowledge includes our knowledge of ourselves, which, though notthe cornerstone of the Aristotelian edifice as it is of Descartes', is essential, especially in the study of thesenses and the intellect." "Of special significance for Catholic philosophers and those who, like Descartes, wished to avoid outright disagreement with traditions were the decrees of the Church, especially the propostions on the soul originating from the Lateran Council under Pope Leo X." "Though sometimes judgements have changed, Aristotle'sdivision between the living and the nonliving, those of Aristotelian authors, Descartes', and our own, overlap a great deal. Butbroad agreement on the domain of life coexists easily with controversy about cases or with grossly dissimilarconcepts of life. The list of things that Hobbes, Descartes, and Regius would call plants and animals differs little from thelists that Toletus, Suarez, or Eustachius would give."
9. Page 22: In DesChenes authors, "rarely, if ever, do we find the kind of first person report that Descartes--fictively or not--gives of the experiments he used to analyze the causes of rainbows, and still less the dated, located reports produced by Pascal and Boyle."
10. Page 26: "In a mechanistic physiology, on the other hand, it is the nonliving that extends its dominion to everythingbut the human and the superhuman. Descartes never, to be sure, quite managed to explain how generation occurs, nor did heexplain how there could be beast-machines in the first place (no one would have expected him to: that was already recounted in Genesis). But when, at the outset of the Meteores , after noting that clouds, like all things above,excite admiration, he expresses the hope to `explain their nature, in such a way that there will no longer be occasion to admireanything one sees there,' that hope could equally well have been applied to the living world. Animals no more deserve ouradmiration than clouds. If their organs exhibit `marvelous artifice,' still the only difference between their workings and thoseof the machines we make is size. And if admiration is the passion we feel when we encounter something `new, or greatlydifferent from what we have known before,' then the animate world ought not excite admiration. There is nothing new in the living that was not in the nonliving; nothing except a difference in scale. But nature takes no account of scale, nor should we."
11. Page 34: "In general, and with the notable exception of the eye, Aristotelian descriptions are at least as complete and accurate as Descartes' or Hobbes'; even Gassendi's, though more compendius, add nothing essential."
12. Page 40: Speaking of the Americas, "Most Aristotelian authors, at least through the time of Descartes, paid little attentionto these developments, contenting themselves for the most part with the descriptions of plants and animals handed down by theancients. Descartes himself gives no indication of noticing them either; but the variety of the living world matters littleto him in any case. Like Suarez, he is interested in just one animal: the human."
13. Page 43: "A certain irony accompanies its demise: Aristotle and Aristotelians took a much greater interest in the abundanceof living forms than did their opponent Descartes and his followers. We now agree with Descartes in hilding that living things do not liveby virtue of any power absent from or irreducible to those of nonliving beings. But the presence in tha animate world of variety,whih the Aristotelians emphasized and the Descartes ignored, together with the generation of like by like, is the primaryfact upon which the Darwinian theory is founded."
14. Page 46: "Whether Descartes and his contemporaries encountered hearts likewise dead to truth during their years in schoolis matter for conjecture; but the pervasive skepticism or indifference that Spina observed was not likely to have dissipatedover the next century."
15. Page 48: "Soul and body are, as Descartes would later put it, intimately joined, as much one with as any two things can be."
16. Page 52: "Though the authors I am studying make it clear that for them the science of the soul is inservice to human salvation, and though other authors do not wholly share their intentions, still the presence, offstage or on,of theological doctrines sometimes treated as `external,' must not be ignored even in the text of lay philosophers likeGiacomo Zabarella or Descartes. Christ's blood, Christ's body, are human: whatever is said of ours cannot contradictwhat must be said of his."
17. Page 57: "Descartes labored to contrive a world in which the `animals' are visibly machines, in order to foster intuitionscontrary to those we have in the actual world, where the true nature of animals is inapparent. The degree to which life in animalsis unquestioned by his predecessors shows that here he had an espically tenacious praejudicium to combat."
18. Page 65: "But if we suppose that Descartes knew something of Aristotelian arguments about the concept of life (they are,I should note, absent from Eustachius), then perhaps the stark separation we see in his philosophy between the operations of thebody and those of the soul, a separation made possible by rejecting all association between `physical' and `intentional' life, owes something to them."
19. Page 71: Speaking of philosophers attacked by Aristotle: "All such views take the soul to be an accident of the body, so that having a soul and having a color are, logically, on a par. Descartes' account of the bete-machine would have yielded a similar conclusion if Descartes had not simply deniedthat animals have souls."
20. Page 72: "One difference between the Aristotelian question and its recent avatars should be remarked. Consciousness is nowalmost universally treated as a property --in Aristotelian terms, an accident--of certain living, and perhaps nonliving, things. To resist the reduction of consciousness to brain waves or fiber firings is to be a `property' dualist. `Substance' dualism, the kind habitually attributed to Descartes, is usually not even in contention. The Aristotelian oppositionto reduction, however, especially where nonhumans are concerned, does not result in substance dualism."
21. Page 75: "Both arguments appear again and again in arguments on behalf of the soul, long after Aristotelianism is gone.Though Descartes, for example, does not avail himself of either argument directly, the first could easily be made by way of the definitionsof the body as res extensa and of soul as res cogitans . "
22. Page 79: "Two models of animation are at odds here. In one, the animating agent is separate from the thing animated. Its exemplar is the relation of pilot to ship, of user to tool. In the other, the animating form, thought of a distinct kind from the forms ofinanimate things, is still to be thought in analogy with them. It does not move the body like a marionette; it is, rather, the sourceof the powers by which the body--or the organism whose formed matter we call the body--moves itself . The Aristotelians, and nodoubt Descartes, too, were well aware of the difference. Jibes about animism or the ghost in the machine, therefore, miss theirtarget. The Aristotelians do all they can to fend off the ghost, the forma assistens , and Descartes, whether he managed to ornot, at least knew well enough that he should. "
23. Pages 80-81: "That the new analysis of actions be Descartes and other novatores into the simple movements of corpuscles or atoms, and the concomitant abandonment of teleology, especially when backed by experimental methods not readily accommodated in the older system of experientia and faith, proved more successful (though to say how without begging important questions about the aims of science is not easy) should not obscure the losses incurred." "It was, as Descartes' quanderies over generation well show, immensely difficult to move directly from the elementary capacities of bits of res extensa in motion to the powers of plants and animals. Immensely difficult, that is, without an intervening stage of analysis into simpler but non-elementary capacities. In practice Descartes helps himself to much of the Aristoteliantaxonomy. But on his own understanding of the things and qualities admissible in natural philosophy, a complex capacity likedigestion or vision cannot stand: it must be reduced to a connected series of elementary capacities."
24. Page 87: "Give the body its own form, and the soul, or at least the active intellect, beings to look like a form of the body only pro operante intrinseco --by virtue of operating on or through it from within. Descartes' conception of the unionwould run a similar risk. His explicit rejection, using the language of the Lateran council, of the forma assistens ,his attempts to recover Aristotelian commonplaces when describing the union, do not quite quell the suspicion. Only by denying that the human body, considered in itself, has any unity stronger than that of a pile of tools (and thus that a forma corporeitatis is needed ) could he forestall a return to the image of pilot and ship. Yet animals, lacking any soul, will then have no unity."
25. Page 96: "In Cartesian physiology, structure and composition, together with the laws of nature, should indeed entail that a beast-machinewill exhibit all the phenomena of life."
26. Page 108: "One can see also why Descartes' description of the soul as res cogitans would look wrong to an Aristotelian: wrong not because the human soul does not think, but because thinking is an operation, and so to call the soul`that which thinks' or `that which has the power of thinking' is a descriptive, not a quidditive, definition."
27. Page 109: "Matter, considered in abstraction from form and the composite, has at most the perfection of existence (strictThomists deny even that). God has all perfections, fully, entirely, eternally. The human essence stands somewhere between:that is what Descartes had in mind in saying he is `like a mean' between nothing and God."
28. Page 110: "The multiplicity of its powers need not entail that the soul itself is multiple. Only if the soul could not be givena coherent place on the scale of perfection would there be motive for scissoring of, say, its rational part. That indeed is an issuethe Aristotelians must resolve, and that Descartes tried to rid himself of by jettisoning animal souls; Gassendi, on the otherhand, resolved it by splitting the soul into a material soul consisting of subtle matter, and a spiritual soul corresponding to the rational part of the Aristotelian soul."
29. Page 113: "Descartes' definition of the soul as a thinking thing not only shifted his weight of definition back toward the powers of thesoul; his insistence that in the nature of the human soul there is nothing that tends toward matter, no habitude toward matter, would seem to remove the one difference among the created spiritual substances--humans and angels--acknowledged by both himand the Aristotelians. Between the human and the divine, moreover, the only difference, it would seem, is that between the infinite andthe finite.
    

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