•  55
    Suárez on Propinquity and the Efficient Cause
    In Benjamin Hill & Henrik Lagerlund (eds.), The Philosophy of Francisco Surez, Oxford University Press. 2012.
    This essay explores Suárez’s commitment to the important causal principle of propinquity or spatial contiguity. Like many, Suárez accepted the principle of no action at a distance. It is argued that this commitment can be retained even though Suárez fundamentally altered the conception of efficient causality because this principle is independent of causality’s nature. Central to understanding Suárez’s commitment to the principle of propinquity is his account of the medium. Furthermore, the contr…Read more
  • Cartesian Science: Sensation, 'Experience' and Representation
    Dissertation, Stanford University. 1987.
    The subject of this thesis is the scientific work of Descartes, and in particular the two treatises Le Monde and L'Homme written in the early 1630s, before the publication of the Discours de la Methode and the Essais in 1637. I examine the theory of sense and imagination in these works, and its role in the legitimation of Cartesian science. Reasoning about sense and imagination was governed by the concept of representation, an interrelated ensemble of modes of reasoning about the causal origin o…Read more
  •  17
    Although the basis of modern biology is Cartesian, Descartes’s theories of biology have been more often ridiculed than studied. Yet, Dennis Des Chene demonstrates, the themes, arguments, and vocabulary of his mechanistic biology pervade the writings of many seventeenth-century authors. In his illuminating account of Cartesian physiology in its historical context, Des Chene focuses on the philosopher’s innovative reworking of that field, including the nature of life, the problem of generation, an…Read more
  •  52
    On Laws and Ends: A Response to Hattab and Menn
    Perspectives on Science 8 (2): 144-163. 2000.
    From the topics discussed by Hattab and Menn, I examine two of special importance. The first is that of active powers: does the Cartesian natural world contain any, or is the apparent efficacy of natural agents always to be referred to God? In arguing that it is, I consider, following Hattab, Descartes' characterization of natural laws as "secondary causes." The second topic is that of ends. Menn argues, and I agree, that in late Aristotelianism Aristotle's own conception of an "art in things" h…Read more
  •  73
    Life after Descartes: Régis on generation
    Perspectives on Science 11 (4): 410-420. 2003.
    . In aid of understanding mechanistic explanation and its limits in the 17th century, I examine the views of Pierre Sylvain Régis on generation. Régis departs from Descartes' theories on one key point. Living things, though they do not differ in nature from nonliving things, and are, as Descartes said, machines, are directly created by God, who forms the seeds of all living things at creation. Preformationism gives Régis not only a means of accounting for seeds and for specific differences among…Read more
  •  42
    Physiologia provides an accessible and comprehensive guide to late Aristotelian natural philosophy; with that context in hand, it offers new interpretations of major themes in Descartes’s natural philosophy.
  •  44
    My title, of course, is an exaggeration. The world no more became mathematical in the seventeenth century than it became ironic in the nineteenth. Either it was mathematical all along, and seventeenth-century philosophers discovered it was, or, if it wasn’t, it could not have been made so by a few books. What became mathematical was physics, and whether that has any bearing on the furniture of the universe is one topic of this paper. Garber says, and I agree, that for Descartes bodies are the th…Read more
  •  6
  •  40
    Aristotle was usually thought to have given two definitions of the soul in the second book of De Anima. The second of these calls it “that by which we live, feel, and think”.1 Of the soul’s three par ts, the vegetative is that by which we live, the sensitive that by which we feel, the rational that by which we think. Human souls have all three parts; animals the vegetative and sensitive; plants only the vegetative.
  •  167
    It is a commonplace that one of the primary tasks of natural science is to discover the laws of nature. Those who don’t think that nature has laws will of course disagree; but of those who do, most will be in accord with Armstrong when he writes that natural science, having discovered the kinds and properties of things, should “state the laws” which those things “obey” (Armstrong What is a law 3). No Scholastic philosopher would have included the discovery of the laws of nature among the aims of…Read more
  •  46
    Descartes in His Time and Space
    Early Science and Medicine 6 (4): 353-361. 2001.
    Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 256 + ills. $ 45.00. ISBN 0801436036. Roger Ariew, John Cottingham, and Tom Sorrell (eds.), Descartes' "Meditations. Background Source Materials (Cambridge Philosophical Texts in Context) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. xviii +270 £45.00. ISBN 0521481260 (hardback); £ 16.95 ISBN 0521485797.
  •  41
    Descartes Reinvented (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (3): 498-499. 2007.
    Dennis Des Chene - Descartes Reinvented - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 498-499 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Dennis Des Chene Washington University in Saint Louis Tom Sorell. Descartes Reinvented. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii + 204. Cloth, $75.00. The "reinvented" Descartes of the title denotes the spontaneous Cartesianism of those who, knowingly or not, presuppose or adopt positions…Read more
  •  14
    In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as Suár…Read more
  •  12
    In the history of philosophy, Jacques Rohault and Pierre-Sylvain Régis bear a twofold burden. They are professed followers, epigones. Worse yet, the natural philosophy they teach has been consigned to the Tartarus of fable: not a theory that failed, but something that failed even to be a theory. In the years in which they were turning Cartesianism into a system, Newton and Huygens were preparing its demise. Its empirical claims were refuted, its mathematics was rendered obsolete by the calculus,…Read more
  •  66
    Finally, he looks at,the various kinds of unity of the body, both in itself and in its union with the soul.Spirits and Clocks continues Des Chene's highly ...
  •  23
    The notion of an automaton, as it is employed in the natural philosophy of Descartes and his closest followers, has three main components. None of them is new; what is new in early modern philosophy is the uses to which this old notion is put, and the idiosyncrasies into which its components are combined by subsequent philosophers. The thaumaturgic element is never entirely suppressed; but the more down-to-earth usage exemplified in antiquity by Aristotle’s references predominates. The automaton …Read more
  •  48
    Bayle's article on Rorarius, author of a work purporting to demonstrate that animals reason better than humans, describes and rejects all but one of the current opinions concerning the souls of animals. That survivor is Leibniz's theory of monads, but Bayle cannot accept pre-established harmony, and so Leibniz goes by the wayside too. Bayle exhibits clearly the consequences of Cartesianism for attempts to distinguish us from the animals. The alternatives are reduced to two: either we do not have…Read more
  •  9
    This is a dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian philosophy, primarily covering philosophy in the 17th century, with a chronology and biography of Descartes's life and times and a bibliography of primary and secondary works related to Descartes and to Cartesians.
  •  7
    Puzzles and revolutions
    History of Science. forthcoming.
  •  554
    Are the laws of nature among the eternal truths that, according to Descartes, are created by God? The basis of those laws is the immutability of the divine will, which is not an eternal truth, but a divine attribute. On the other hand, the realization of those laws, and in particular, the quantitative consequences to be drawn from them, depend upon the eternal truths insofar as those truths include the foundations of geometry and arithmetic.
  • Animal as category : Bayle's "Rorarius"
    In Justin E. H. Smith (ed.), The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 2006.
    A study of the problem of animal souls as treated by Pierre Bayle in his article on Rorarius in the Dictionnaire. Early modern philosophers, if they rejected dualism, tended—as Bayle shows—to be driven either to materialism or to panpsychism
  •  13
    Somewhere between hagiography and debunking lies truth. Or so we may think: the biographer’s sources are almost always tipped one way or the other, and it is his or her job to establish, or divine, the way of authentic fact and, if facts fall short, then of sturdy sober hypothesis. In general the debunker has more fun, especially when the weight of tradition favors the ennobling, if not the beatification, of its subject.
  •  10
    Mechanisms of life in the seventeenth century: Borelli, Perrault, Régis
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2): 245-260. 2005.