Amy Schmitter

Method may be second only to substance-dualism as the best-known among Descartes's enthusiasms. But knowing that Descartes wants to promote good method is one thing; knowing what exactly he wants to promote is another. Two views seem fairly widespread. The first rests on the claim that Descartes endorses a purely procedural picture of reason, so that right reasoning is a matter of proprieties of operation, rather than respect for its objects. On this view, a method for regulating our reason would offer general rules of procedure, abstracted as much as possible from the content of particular problems. Second is the view that Descartes maintains what we might call an ‘intellectualist’ approach to method, one that restricts right reasoning to operations internal to the mind, and allows the use of external bodily resources only as initial inputs or as helpful props— convenient, but marginal to the procedure and readily eliminated from it.

Is Descartes the most misunderstood philosopher in the history of philosophy? To many of us in the business of Descartes scholarship, it certainly seems so. Time and time again, we find ourselves faced with pronouncements about one or another of Descartes's 'errors' — whether the shortcomings of the theater model of consciousness, or the pernicious after-effects of a foundationalism devoted to the transparency of the mental, or the shocking vilification of the body and emotions. Typically these pronouncements are paired with exhortations to overcome the Cartesian X, where 'X' stands for whatever item crucial to enlightenment is currently most misunderstood. That X is some term rarely used and drastically ..

This paper argues that Descartes conceives of theoretical reason in terms derived from practical reason, particularly in the role he gives to the passions. That the passions serve — under normal circumstances — to preserve the union of mind and body is a well-known feature of Descartes's defense of our native make-up. But they are equally important in our more purely theoretical endeavors. Some passions, most notably wonder, provide a crucial source of motivation in the search after truth, and also serve to reinforce memory. Our cognitive successes and failure scan also be tracked by passions and trains of passions.

While Descartes's status as a "representationalist" is often a subject of vehement debate, what exactly he means by "representation" is not. I look to Descartes's early work to show that he first conceives of representation through signification, in which the sign and the signified are isomorphic; on this view, relations of representation can be arbitrary and are to be distinguished from relations of resemblance. I then examine images to show the possibility of an image constructing a relation to its viewer, or "subject-position," in which that subject-position fails to display the attributes of extended things. Such a construction might be applied to the "I" of the Meditations--distinct from all extended substances, it nonetheless has direct access to them through its non-objectified sense-ideas. On this basis, I propose a "model" of representation for ideas: an idea represents its object O to a subject-position S through a vehicle of representation X under some relation R. I argue that this model can explain the uses Descartes makes of "represent," particularly for ideas. But it must be understood properly: Descartes comes to conceive of the vehicle of representation simply as the form taken by the direct interaction of the mind and the things objectively present to it--but a form that can take on a life of its own, giving rise to the possibilities of clarity and distinctness or of confusion in ideas. But what is truly novel about Descartes's conception is the mind's ability to form higher-order representations that represent the conditions of representation itself, thereby achieving certainty for some mental representations without starting from any incorrigible, immediate perceptions. This possibility is realized most clearly in the understanding of my nature as a thinking and representing being, where I can represent myself as the subject-position distinct from all extended things, but also can represent myself as joyfully and representatively united with a body all my own

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on passions and affections. It explains that about 8,000 books published during this period mentioned passion and that it started with Thomas Wright's Passions of the Mind in General. The chapter also explores the intellectual basis of the writers who wrote about passion – which includes Augustinianism, Aristotelianism, stoicism, Epicureanism, and medicine – and furthermore, analyzes the relevant works of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and Lord Shaftesbury.