Tad Schmaltz

In this article, I consider Descartes’ enigmatic claim that we must assert that the material world is indefinite rather than infinite. The focus here is on the discussion of this claim in Descartes’ late correspondence with More. One puzzle that emerges from this correspondence is that Descartes insists to More that we are not in a position to deny the indefinite universe has limits, while at the same time indicating that we conceive a contradiction in the notion that the universe has a limit. I reject one attempt to resolve this apparent conflict which appeals to Descartes’ admission to More that divine omnipotence requires that God can create a vacuum in nature, and focus instead on his response to More’s claim that this omnipotence requires the possibility of a completion of the division of matter that results in atoms. Finally, I distinguish Descartes’ indefinite from two other kinds of infinity with which it might well be confused. The first is an essentially incomplete ‘potential infinity’ that Descartes discusses in the Third Meditation, and the second is the sort of quantitative infinity that Leibniz – contrary to Descartes – denies can constitute a completed whole.

In this chapter I consider the relation of history of philosophy to the history of science. I argue that though these two disciplines are naturally linked, they also have special commitments that distinguish each from the other. I begin with the history of the history of science, a discipline that was once allied with philosophy of science but that has increasingly evolved toward social history. Then I consider the debate over whether the history of philosophy is essential for, or rather largely irrelevant to, contemporary “analytic” philosophy. My conclusion is that the relation of history of philosophy to philosophy is best conceived in terms of the relation of history of science to history. Finally, I consider a particular case study of the relation of history of science to history of philosophy that concerns contextualist scholarship on early modern philosophy and science.

In a 1669 letter to his mentor Thomasius, Leibniz writes that "hardly any of the Cartesians have added anything to the discoveries of their master" insofar as they "have published only paraphrases of their leader."1 The book that is the focus of my remarks here—Roger Ariew's Descartes and the First Cartesians —shows that Leibniz was most certainly incorrect. In particular, Ariew draws attention to the fact that there was a concerted effort to present a new sort of Cartesianism that conforms to the structure of the early modern French scholastic curriculum. Though this effort was inspired by Descartes's own attempt to present his views in this manner, the later "Cartesian scholasticism"...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cartesian Truth by Thomas C. VinciTad M. SchmaltzThomas C. Vinci. Cartesian Truth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 270. Cloth, $45.00.The book jacket copy claims that Cartesian Truth merits “serious consideration by both contemporary analytic philosophers and postmodern thinkers.” Yet the work is written in a decidedly analytic idiom, and it is keyed primarily to recent analytic discussions of [End Page 531] epistemological foundationalism. Moreover, what is most valuable is not its comments concerning the relevance of Descartes to these discussions, but rather its admirably clear rational reconstruction of Descartes’ own epistemology. In fact, this study usefully distinguishes two different but interrelated epistemological theories in Descartes. The first is connected to Descartes’ “project of pure inquiry” (to borrow Bernard Williams’ phrase), a project involving the attempt to derive truths a priori from the “rule of truth,” that is, the rule that whatever one clearly and distinctly perceives is true. The first three chapters of Vinci’s work consider this aprioristic project. The last four chapters focus on the project in Descartes of providing an epistemology of sense experience that allows for nonintellectual knowledge of the material world. Vinci makes some original and insightful claims about these projects and their interconnections.Vinci begins by defending a reading of the rule of truth which requires (roughly) that clearly and distinctly perceived properties exist in a substance either eminently or formally. One may doubt whether Vinci has succeeded in his stated goal of providing a “defense” of this rule (208), especially since he makes no attempt, as far as I can tell, to offer a transcendental argument for the substance/property metaphysic that the rule presupposes on his reading of it. However, this reading does reveal how that rule could provide a foundation for the causal principles that are essential to the argument for the existence of God in the Third Meditation. This discussion thus has the virtue of yielding a solution to the puzzle of why Descartes was so confident that these principles are revealed by the “light of nature.”At the end of chapter 3, Vinci notes a well-known difference between the proof of the existence of the material world in the Sixth Meditation, which appeals to our “natural inclination” to believe that sensations come from bodies, and the version of that proof in the second part of the Principles of Philosophy, which appeals rather to a clear and distinct perception of material properties that is “stimulated by sense.” What is new and interesting in Vinci, however, is an explanation of this difference that appeals to Descartes’ commitment in the latter text to the view that nonintellectual “concrete intuitions” warrant claims concerning the existence of material substance and its properties. Vinci proposes that Descartes came to accept such a view because he adopted a revised version of the rule of truth that dictates that the properties we concretely intuit formally exist in a substance.The second part of his study considers various issues connected to the notion of concrete intuition. There Vinci defends in particular the thesis that Descartes took such intuitions to pertain only to the imagination, and thus to differ in kind from sensations of secondary qualities such as color, temperature, and taste. At times he makes the stronger claim that Descartes “never speaks of sensations” of primary qualities such as “size, shape, and so on” (102). There is, however, a notable counterexample to such a claim in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, which lists as innate sensory ideas not only those of pains, colors and sounds but also those of shapes and motions. I found Vinci’s own discussion of this passage (148–51) to be uncharacteristically confused. Nonetheless, one could distinguish between the sensory perception of the extension of, say, a particular colored patch, on the one hand, and the imaginative perception of extension as a common sensible, on the other. One could then conclude, in line with Vinci’s own [End Page 532] position, that Descartes took only the latter sort of perception to count as a concrete intuition, and thus to fall under the revised version of the rule of truth.I have mentioned only...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Has Cartesianism To Do with Jansenism?Tad M. SchmaltzMy title is modeled on the famous query of the third-century theologian, Tertullian: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian’s question asks what pagan Greek learning has to do with the theology of the early Church. By comparison my question asks what philosophical Cartesianism has to do with theological Jansenism, and more specifically what these movements had to do with each other in the France of Louis XIV. To anticipate, the answer is: not much and plenty. I say not much, in the sense that there are profound differences in the approaches and interests of the namesakes of these two movements: in the case of Cartesianism, the French critic of scholastic natural philosophy, René Descartes, and in the case of Jansenism, the Louvain critic of Jesuit theology, Cornelius Jansen (Jansenius). Yet I also say plenty, in the sense that there was in the second half of the seventeenth century a fairly widespread belief in France of an intimate link between the two movements that the work of Descartes and Jansen inspired. What we need here is a story that shows how despite the differences between these two thinkers, their French followers were commonly associated with each other.In order to tell such a story I need to consider some basic difficulties in pinning down the nature of the movements themselves. There are of course familiar problems with the appeal to generic “isms” in the history of ideas, but I also want to consider special concerns pertaining to the definition of French Jansenism and French Cartesianism. In the course of this consideration I suggest that since both movements are to some extent constructs that emerged from intellectual battles in late-seventeenth-century France, they must be understood in light of the political, theological, and philosophical goals of the polemicists involved in these battles.Perhaps the most obvious reason for the connection between the Jansenist and Cartesian movements is that one of the most prominent of the Jansenist theologians, the Port-Royalist Antoine Arnauld, was also an enthusiastic defender [End Page 37] of Descartes’s metaphysical system. But while Arnauld undoubtedly played an important role in the emergence of this link, I think that the full story of its emergence must include a consideration of the different role played by a somewhat neglected figure in the history of early modern Cartesianism, namely, the Lorraine Benedictine Robert Desgabets (1610–78). Desgabets was more deeply involved than Arnauld in the 1671 “Eucharist affair,” which was important for the polemical linkage of Jansenism to Cartesianism in France. Whereas Arnauld attempted to separate Jansenist theology from Cartesian philosophy, Desgabets tried to provide Cartesian foundations for a theology with strong Jansenist overtones. It was Desgabets more than Arnauld, then, who was concerned to apply Cartesian principles to issues of importance for the Jansenist theologian.What Has Descartes To Do with Jansen?A primary trigger for the bitter “Jansenist controversies” in France during the seventeenth century was the posthumous publication in 1640 of the Augustinus of Jansen, the late Bishop of Ypres in the Spanish Netherlands. This technical three-volume work attempts to draw from Augustine responses to Pelagian and semi-Pelagian views concerning the prelapsarian state of innocence, the fall from this state, and the grace required to overcome that fall. Jansen’s emphasis is on the pervasive corruption of original sin and on the impossibility of meritorious action that does not derive from God’s grace to the elect. The Jesuits in Louvain saw the work as a throwback to the theses of Michel du Bay (Baius) that Pope Paul V had condemned in 1567 due to pressure exerted by their order, and they made an unsuccessful attempt to stop the publication of the book. 1 After its publication this text drew the suspicion of Cardinal Richelieu, who (correctly) believed Jansen to be the author of Mars Gallicus, an anonymous pamphlet protesting Richelieu’s anti-Habsburg policies. Richelieu chose a theologian of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, Isaac Habert, to launch an attack against the Augustinus. In a series of sermons starting in 1642 Habert criticized Jansen’s assertion of the necessity of contrition...

This volume presents new research on Cartesian psychophysiology that combines historical and textual analysis with a consideration of recent advances in contemporary neuroscience research. It seeks to explain why the theory of the Cartesian brain and its communication with the mind still offers a remarkable model for cognitive studies. New research in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science has reignited interest in the role and the structure of the "Cartesian brain" among scholars of Descartes. This volume rethinks Cartesian psychology from the perspective of physiology, with the aim of redetermining the contributions of the brain and central nervous system to mental phenomena. The first part of the volume concerns the details of Descartes's own physiological account of the brain. The discussion covers his treatment not only of the anatomy of the brain, but also of the mode of interaction between mind and body, in which the pineal gland plays a central role, and of the relation between the brain and the rest of the body. The second part considers the reception and legacy of the Cartesian brain. The focus here is on understanding how Cartesian psychophysiology was received by Descartes's early modern contemporaries and immediate successors, as well as on the relevance of the Cartesian brain for contemporary neurophysiology and cognitive science. The Cartesian Brain is an essential resource for scholars and advanced students interested in Descartes, history of philosophy, history of science, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

Spinoza seems to argue both that “God or Nature” is mereologically simple, and that this being is mereologically complex insofar as it is composed of parts. This chapter proposes on Spinoza's behalf a resolution of this antinomy. This resolution focuses on Spinoza's mereology of the material world. It offers an alternative interpretation according to which Spinoza adheres both to the indivisibility of extended substance and to the reality of the finite modal parts that compose an infinite modal whole. In the Oldenburg Letter, Spinoza claims that “concerning whole and parts, the chapter considers things as parts of some whole to the extent that the nature of the one so adapts itself to the nature of the other so that they agree with one another as far as possible”. The chapter argues that a similar assumption underlies Peterson's argument against the reality in Spinoza of divisible spatial quantity.

in a january 1642 letter, rené descartes advises his correspondent—his then-follower, the Utrecht medical professor Henricus Regius—to consistently endorse the view that the human mind is related to its body by means of a "substantial union": Whenever the occasion arises, as much privately as publicly, you ought to profess that you believe a human to be a true ens per se and not per accidens and the mind to be really and substantially united to the body not through position or disposition [situm aut dispositionem], as you say in your last written text, but through a true mode of union [verum modum unionis], as everyone...

This paper compares the development of the notion of continuous quantity in the work of Francisco Suárez and René Descartes. The discussion begins with a consideration of Suárez’s rejection of the view – common to ‘realists’ such as Thomas Aquinas and ‘nominalists’ such as William of Ockham – that quantity is inseparable from the extension of material integral parts. Crucial here is Suárez’s view that quantified extension exhibits a kind of impenetrability that distinguishes it from other kinds of extension. This view sheds considerable light on initially obscure remarks on impenetrability in Descartes’ late correspondence with Henry More. Though Descartes differs from Suárez and other major scholastic figures in his understanding of the relation of quantity to material substance, he nonetheless requires in the end some version of the Suárezian distinction between quantified and unquantified extension.

It is a matter of continuing scholarly dispute whether Descartes offers a metaphysics of the material world that is “monist” or “pluralist.” One passage that has become crucial to this debate is from the Synopsis of the Meditations, in which Descartes argues that since “body taken in general” is a substance, and since all substances are “by their nature incorruptible,” this sort of body is incorruptible as well. In this article I defend a pluralist reading of this passage, according to which there are indefinitely many bodies-taken-in-general, each of which counts as an incorruptible material substance. However, I also consider some surprising features of the argument in the Synopsis. One is that this argument conflicts with the implication in Descartes that any two “really distinct” substances can each exist without the other existing. Another is that the argument tends to undermine his suggestion that there is room at a fundamental metaphysical level for ordinary material objects.

This book is a systematic study of Descartes' theory of causation and its relation to the medieval and early modern scholastic philosophy that provides its proper historical context. The argument presented here is that even though Descartes offered a dualistic ontology that differs radically from what we find in scholasticism, his views on causation were profoundly influenced by scholastic thought on this issue. This influence is evident not only in his affirmation in the Meditations of the abstract scholastic axioms that a cause must contain the reality of its effects and that conservation does not differ in reality from creation, but also in the details of the accounts of body-body interaction in his physics, of mind-body interaction in his psychology, and of the causation that he took to be involved in free human action. In contrast to those who have read Descartes as endorsing the "occasionalist" conclusion that God is the only real cause, a central thesis of this study is that he accepted what in the context of scholastic debates regarding causation is the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the causal source of natural change. What emerges from the defense of this interpretation of Descartes is a new understanding of his contribution to modern thought on causation.

In this article I explore Leibniz's claim in the Theodicy that on the essential points Malebranche's theodicy "reduces to" his own view. This judgment may seem to be warranted given that both thinkers emphasize that evils are justified by the fact that they follow from the simple and uniform laws that govern that world which is worthy of divine creation. However, I argue that Leibniz's theodicy differs in several crucial respects from Malebranche's. I begin with a qualified endorsement of Charles Larmore's recent claim that remarks in Malebranche's correspondence with Leibniz indicate that their theodicies rely on incompatible conceptions of the moral rationality of divine action. I also attempt to go beyond Larmore's discussion in highlighting further differences concerning the sort of freedom involved in the divine act of creation. My conclusion is that these differing conceptions of divine morality and divine freedom reveal that in contrast to the case of Leibniz, Malebranche's theodicy not only does not require that God create anything at all, but also is compatible with the result that the world he decides to create is not uniquely the best possible.

Cet article concerne l’application de la méthode « dianoématique », ou « étude des doctrines », dans le commentaire important de Martial Gueroult aux deux premières parties de l’ Éthique de Spinoza. Gueroult met l’accent sur deux affirmations distinctes dans les deux volumes de ce commentaire. La première affirmation, tirée du premier volume, est que Spinoza adopte une version du monisme dans la première partie de l’ Éthique selon laquelle Dieu, en tant que substance infinie, consiste en une union d’une infinité de substances distinctes constituées chacune d’un attribut unique. La deuxième affirmation, tirée du deuxième volume, est que Spinoza est contraint, du fait de ce qu’il écrit dans la deuxième partie de l’ Éthique, d’accepter la conclusion qu’il existe deux types de «parallélisme» différents entre les attributs divins.

This collection includes material from the international conference, “Spinoza-Malebranche,” held in 2015, first at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and subsequently at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon. The justification for the volume, as indicated in Chantel Jaquet’s preface, is that the relations between Spinoza and Malebranche have not recently drawn the sort of attention from scholars that the relations of each to Descartes have received. Of course, there is the question of why the former relations are worthy of investigation, a question that is perhaps not as pressing in the case of the relations that Spinoza and Malebranche each bear to Descartes. I return to this “why” question...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editorial AnnouncementsTad M. SchmaltzThis issue introduces "Current Scholarship," a new series at the Journal of the History of Philosophy. This series comprises critical reviews from leading historians of philosophy of the current literature on particular historical authors or topics. Mary Louise Gill's inaugural essay in this issue concerns current scholarship on Aristotle's Metaphysics, and John Marenbon is contributing the next essay for the series, scheduled for publication in 2006, on the recent literature on the philosophy of Abelard. Future topics include late medieval ethics and the history of 20th-century analytic philosophy. We hope that the Current Scholarship reviews will prove to be a useful research tool for specialists and students alike.It is my pleasure to announce as well that Jack Zupko of Emory University will be the new Book Review Editor for the Journal. He will assume the editorship July 1, 2005. From that time, all correspondence concerning book reviews should be sent to Professor Jack Zupko, Book Review Editor, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Philosophy Department, 214 Bowden Hall, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 ([email protected]).On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to express my thanks to the previous Book Review Editor, Jan Wojcik of Auburn University, and to her editorial assistant, Mark Wilson, for their excellent work for the Journal during the past five years.Copyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc....