Tad Schmaltz

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