Tad Schmaltz

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 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"...

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.

In his 1647 Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, Descartes responded to the view of Henricus Regius that all thought is derived from sensation by making two claims: first, that even sensory ideas are broadly innate since they are produced by a mental faculty, and second, that certain notions are more narrowly innate because they cannot be derived from sense experience. Part One of my dissertation examines issues pertaining to the first claim against Regius. In Chapter 1, I contend that Descartes' argument in the Comments for his account of the origin of sensory ideas derives from a response to scholastic accounts of sensation found thoughout his writings. By setting this argument in its historical context, I also show that it is inadequate. In Chapter 2, I turn to elements of Descartes' mature thought that provide better support for the appeal to a faculty of mind that forms sensations. By examining his discussions of corporeal interaction, along with those of his successors, I reveal that Descartes is committed to the view that bodies cannot possess any powers, including the power to produce sensory states of mind. I also claim that his system allows for the mind to produce sensory ideas. ;Part Two considers Descartes' second claim against Regius. In Chapter 3, I discuss the view of the Comments that certain notions are narrowly innate in the genetic sense of being produced by mind without the aid of sense experience. I hold that this sort of derivation cannot be central for Descartes, since it does not allow for his view that notions of geometrical figures are both innate and formed by means of abstraction from materials supplied by sense experience. In Chapter 4, I contend that a close reading of Descartes' discussion of geometrical essences reveals an epistemic sense of innateness, according to which the mind possesses an intellectual power to discover notions vital for knowledge that cannot be supported by sense experience. I conclude by arguing that this sense of innateness best illumines Descartes' claim in the Meditations that the notion of the self and God are innate

Though the publication of Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss integrative approaches. This is therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with discussion of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases"--Publisher's description, back cover.

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.

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 book offers a provocative interpretation of the theory of the soul in the writings of the French Cartesian, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Though recent work on Malebranche's philosophy of mind has tended to emphasize his account of ideas, Schmaltz focuses rather on his rejection of Descartes' doctrine that the mind is better known than the body. In particular, he considers and defends Malebranche's argument that this rejection has a Cartesian basis. Schmaltz reveals that this argument not only provides a fresh perspective on Cartesianism but also is relevant to current debates in the philosophy of mind.

This article examines the transition from causes to laws in research during the early modern period in Europe. It discusses Stillman Drake's claim that the search for causes of events in nature that guided science from the time of Aristotle was superseded at the dawn of modern science starting with the work of Galileo. However, there are complications for the suggestion that there was a process by which causes gave way to laws in science. This suggests that Drake's remark that there has been a progression in modern science from causes to laws may suggest that there was a decisive and permanent transition to Bishop Berkeley's view that explanation in terms of scientific laws involves a mere subsumption of particular events under inductive generalizations, as opposed to an inference to metaphysically robust causal structures.

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...

I consider a somewhat obscure but important feature of Descartes’s physics that concerns the notion of the “force of rest.” Contrary to a prominent occasionalist interpretation of Descartes’s physics, I argue that Descartes himself attributes real forces to resting bodies. I also take his account of rest to conflict with the view that God conserves the world by “re-creating” it anew at each moment. I turn next to the role of rest in Malebranche. Malebranche takes Descartes to endorse his own occasionalist version of physics. However, he nonetheless rejects Descartes’s account of rest by appealing to the fact that whereas God’s production of motion requires a power beyond the mere power to create, his production of rest requires only the latter power. It turns out that this argument in Malebranche is incompatible with the sort of “re-creationist” account of divine conservation that he is widely thought to have inherited from Descartes.

Martial Gueroult (1891–1976) Belonged to a remarkable generation of French scholars of early modern philosophy, in general, and of Descartes’s thought, in particular. This cohort includes such notable figures as Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), Jean Laporte (1a886–1948), Henri Gouhier (1898–1994), Ferdinand Alquié (1908–85), and Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (1918–2004). However, Gueroult was the only one of this group to publish a commentary devoted exclusively to Descartes’s Meditations, namely, his Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons;1 indeed, no other comparable French commentary has appeared since the time of its initial publication.2 In addition, among the very important works on Descartes that Gueroult’s French ..

This article considers Descartes's famous claim that mind and body are distinct substances from the unusual perspective of Nicolas Malebranche. In particular, it focuses on Malebranche's argument that since Cartesians feel compelled to support such a claim by appealing to their clear idea of body, they must lack access to a clear idea of soul. The main conclusion is that while such an argument does not apply directly to Descartes's discussion in the "Meditations" of mind- body distinctness, this discussion nonetheless renders Descartes vulnerable to Malebranche's central charge that the nature of body is for Cartesians better known than the nature of the soul

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.