Tad Schmaltz

There is a general sense that the philosophy of Descartes was a dominant force in early modern thought. Since the work in the nineteenth century of French historians of Cartesian philosophy, however, there has been no fully contextualized comparative examination of the various receptions of Descartes in different portions of early modern Europe. This study addresses the need for a more current understanding of these receptions by considering the different constructions of Descartes's thought that emerged in the Calvinist United Provinces and Catholic France, the two main centers for early modern Cartesianism, during the period dating from the last decades of his life to the century or so following his death in 1650. It turns out that we must speak not of a single early modern Cartesianism rigidly defined in terms of Descartes's own authorial intentions, but rather of a loose collection of early modern Cartesianisms that involve a range of different positions on various sets of issues. Though more or less rooted in Descartes's somewhat open-ended views, these Cartesianisms evolved in different ways over time in response to different intellectual and social pressures. Chapters of this study are devoted to: the early modern Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of Descartes and the incompatible Cartesian responses to these; conflicting attitudes among early modern Cartesians toward ancient thought and modernity; competing early modern attempts to combine Descartes's views with those of Augustine; the different occasionalist accounts of causation within early modern Cartesianism; and the impact of various forms of early modern Cartesianism on both Dutch medicine and French physics.

Spinoza's Mediate Infinite Mode TAD M. SCHMALTZ IN PART I of the Ethics, Spinoza argued that a modification is infinite just in case it either "follows from the absolute nature of any attribute of God" or "follows from some attribute of God, as it is modified by such a modification" that is infinite. 1 The main purpose of this argument is to bolster the claim later in this text that a finite modification can follow from a divine attribute only insofar as that attribute is modified by another finite modification. 2 Thus it is understandable that in the section that contains the argument Spinoza did not actually affirm the existence of the two kinds of infinite modifications he mentioned, which following standard practice I call "immediate infinite modes" and "mediate infinite modes," respectively.3 Yet in this section he did 'E IP21,D-22,D, G II 65-66/Curley 429-3 o. In the text and notes of this paper I use the following abbreviations pertaining to Spinoza's writings: E: Ethics ; Ep.: Letters ; RDPP: Descartes' Principles of Philosophy ; CM: Appendix containing Metaphysical Thoughts ; KV: Short Treatise ; TdlE: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect ; G: C. Gebhardt, ed., Spinoza Opera, 4 vols. , cited by volume and page; Curley: E. Curley, trans, and ed., The Collected Works of..

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.