Tad Schmaltz

Hobbes s’est opposé à Descartes en affirmant que l’on doit inférer du cogito que le sujet de la pensée est matériel. Le présent article commence par examiner cet argument fameux. Selon une interprétation courante, l’argument repose sur la théorie des idées de Hobbes. Cependant, cette interprétation a été contestée dans la littérature récente. Un examen de ce débat nous conduit à examiner un autre argument selon lequel tout sujet doit être localisé dans l’univers au moyen de son extension. Ce nouvel argument sert à relier les vues de Hobbes à celles de son critique, Henry More, qui, à leur tour, sont pertinentes pour comprendre son échange avec Descartes sur la question de savoir si les esprits sont étendus. En examinant cet échange ici, nous nous proposons de confronter Descartes au matérialisme de Hobbes à un niveau plus profond que ne le permet leur discussion initiale sur le cogito.

This chapter considers how certain tensions in Descartes’s account of eternal truths and immutable essences are reflected in later debates among his followers. The dialectic involves three different accounts of such truths and essences. The first is a form of Platonism in Malebranche that saves the eternity and immutability of the essences and truths by grounding them in God’s uncreated ideas. The second Cartesian view is a form of conceptualism in Arnauld that grounds our knowledge of truths concerning essences in our own ideas. Arnauld embraced the consequence of this view that these truths lack the sort of eternality and immutability that truths possess in the divine intellect. The third is the view in Regis—which he took to be required by Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths—that eternal truths concerning the created world are grounded in eternal and immutable features of that world.

This chapter is a critical review of two recently published works on Descartes: Helen Hattab’s _Descartes on Forms and Mechanisms_ and Peter Machamer and J.E. McGuire’s _Descartes’s Changing Mind_. Both works reflect the recent trend in Descartes scholarship to focus on Descartes’s writings on natural philosophy and to emphasize developments in these writings over time. The discussion of Hattab considers her central claim that whereas in his earlier writings Descartes offered an argument against the material substantial forms of the scholastics that is grounded in his mechanics, during the 1640s he settled instead on a metaphysical argument against such forms that reflects the influence of the Dutch atomist Gorlaeus. The discussion of Machacher and McGuire considers their central claim that Descartes’s account both of causation in the physical world and of the epistemic status of our claims about this world underwent a radical shift around the time of the _Meditations_.

The ancient topic of universals was central to scholastic philosophy, which raised the question of whether universals exist as Platonic forms, as instantiated Aristotelian forms, as concepts abstracted from singular things, or as words that have universal signification. It might be thought that this question lost its importance after the decline of scholasticism in the modern period. However, the fourteen contributions to this volume indicate that the issue of universals retained its vitality in modern philosophy. Modern philosophers in fact were interested in three sets of issues concerning universals: (1) issues concerning the ontological status of universals, (2) issues concerning the psychology of the formation of universal concepts or terms, and (3) issues concerning the value and use of universal concepts or terms in the acquisition of knowledge. Chapters in this volume consider the various forms of “Platonism,” “conceptualism,” and “nominalism” (and distinctive combinations thereof) that emerged from the consideration of such issues in the work of modern philosophers. The volume covers not only the canonical modern figures, namely, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, but also more neglected figures such as Pierre Gassendi, Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Nicolas Malebranche, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and John Norris.

This chapter studies the conception of eternity in Spinoza’s early period. There is some scholarly controversy over whether Spinoza endorsed a durational or non-durational account of eternity in the _Ethics_. There is also the unresolved question of whether the sort of eternity that Spinoza attributes to substance in this text is the same as the sort of eternity he attributes there to certain modes of substance (such as “infinite modes” and the human mind). the chapter suggests that we can make some progress on these difficult interpretive issues by considering the connection of the _Ethics_ to two 1663 texts by the young Spinoza: the _Cogitata Metaphysica_ (appended to Spinoza’s book, _Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy_ ) and the “Letter on the Infinite.” According to the chapter, these texts indicate that, on Spinoza’s considered view, substance is eternal in a non-durational sense, but modes can be eternal only in a durational sense.

In this chapter, Tad M. Schmaltz compares and contrasts the views of Malebranche with those of Berkeley and Hume concerning the natural, moral, and divine orders, arguing that these different figures are united by a concern with general laws in both the natural and moral orders. Malebranche and Berkeley agree that the natural and moral orders are both grounded in God's intellect and will, even as they disagree on the purpose that the natural and moral orders are supposed to serve. Hume, by contrast, rejects any kind of grounding of the laws of nature and morality in God, asserting that both are based in human nature, and he also breaks with Malebranche and Berkeley by conceiving of the natural order as thoroughly impersonal as it is indifferent to human beings and to any moral considerations, though his moral theory, like Berkeley's, does sometimes recognize that morality plays a role in promoting human welfare.

This chapter concerns Leibniz’s attempt to argue in the Theodicy that God is not the author of the “moral evil”—that is, sin—deriving from the free choice of created agents, despite the fact that he “concurs” with this evil in both a “moral” and “physical” manner. This chapter begins by explaining why Leibniz holds that moral evil, as opposed to “metaphysical” or “physical” evil, introduces the most serious difficulty for divine conduct. Then it considers the crucial importance for Leibniz’s account of God’s moral and physical concurrence of his claim that God merely permits, and does not actually will, sinful action. Here the chapter focuses in particular on Leibniz’s contention that privations in creatures serve as a special kind of “deficient cause” of sin, with which God does not physically concur. The conclusion is that this position provides essential support for Leibniz’s conclusion that God merely permits sin in morally concurring with it.

In this chapter, Section 1 begins with Malebranche's conception of the will in terms of bodily motion, emphasizing his claim that such a conception fails to reveal the nature of the mental habits or dispositions that pertain to the will. Though Arnauld indicated some surface difficulties with this negative claim, he did not do justice to Malebranche's central point that Cartesians must admit that the will has a hidden structure, the nature of which they cannot understand fully. Section 2 then considers Malebranche's development of Descartes's claim that we are conscious of possessing a “freedom of indifference” that involves the action of an undetermined power. The emphasis here is on Malebranche's various attempts to show that our consciousness of such a power is compatible with his occasionalism, i.e., his doctrine that God is the only real cause. These attempts rely ultimately on the claim that this consciousness does not yield a clear understanding of the nature of this power. Malebranche took this result of his investigation of the undetermined freedom that Descartes posited to reinforce his thesis that Cartesians have only a confused knowledge of the nature of the soul and its faculties.

Malebranche accepted a substance dualism in which the soul has the property of “spirituality” or immateriality. In this chapter, Section 1 traces the evolution in his thought from his initial suggestion that consciousness directly reveals the spirituality of the soul to a later demonstration of spirituality that proceeds from the premise that the nature of body consists in extension to the conclusion that the substance that is the subject of sensible qualities is distinct from body. Section 2 then takes up Arnauld's critique of Malebranche's claim that such a demonstration does not rely on a clear idea of the soul. The upshot here is that this critique fails to confront Malebranche's central charge that Cartesians have only an indirect knowledge of the soul's spirituality. Finally, Section 3 indicates that though Malebranche's indirect demonstration differs significantly from Descartes's main argument for mind–body distinctness, certain remarks in Descartes render him vulnerable to Malebranche's claim that Cartesians cannot discern spirituality in the nature of the soul alone.

In this chapter, Section 1 starts with a proof of the immortality of the soul in Descartes that provided the main source for Malebranche's discussions of immortality. Section 2 then examines two distinctive implications of Malebranche's own arguments for immortality, the first that we need to appeal to the idea of body to establish that the soul is an indivisible substance, and the second that we can demonstrate by reason that the soul is in fact immortal once we recognize the nature of the divine attributes. The second implication tends to be more dominant in Malebranche's treatments of immortality, but as is indicated in Section 3, the first implication is reflected also in a sophisticated but somewhat overlooked argument for the indestructibility or indefectibility of substance in the work of Malebranche's Cartesian contemporary, Robert Desgabets.

In this chapter, Section 1 considers Malebranche's attempt to couple Descartes's claim that we know the nature of body through the intellect rather than through the senses with the corollary of his own doctrine of the “vision in God” that we know bodies by means of an idea of extension that exists in God. Though Malebranche's initial discussions of this doctrine emphasize the distinction between sensory modifications of our soul and the intellectual idea of extension in God, his later writings indicate that this idea is causally linked in a special way to intellectual or pure perceptions in us that clearly reveal the nature of body. Section 2 relates this mature position to his disputes with Cartesian critics such as Arnauld and Regis over the nature of ideas. This section also highlights Malebranche's claim against such critics that our pure perceptions are no more intelligible to us than are our sensations. Such a claim draws attention to the contrast between the clear objective view of body provided by pure perceptions and the confused subjective view of the perceptions themselves.

In this chapter, Section 1 considers Malebranche's development of the position, which he claimed to find in Descartes, that sensible qualities are only modifications of our soul. Section 2 then takes up Malebranche's thesis that we know the nature of these modifications through a confused consciousness rather than through a clear idea. Critics as varied as Arnauld, Desgabets, and Regis objected that Cartesians have as much reason to say that they know their sensations through a clear idea of thought as they have to say that they know bodily modifications through a clear idea of extension. However, these critics failed to grapple with Malebranche's main contention that our objective view of the body is superior in kind to our subjective view of our own sensations. Such a contention is linked to the point that we have only a limited understanding of the nature of sensory qualia. Section 3 concludes by focusing on two arguments in Malebranche for the claim that what the Cartesians themselves say about our knowledge of our sensory modifications reveals that they lack access to a clear idea of the soul.

This chapter concerns Malebranche's reaction to Descartes's cogito argument, according to which we know with certainty the existence of the self as a thinking thing. Section 1 indicates that Malebranche accepted with various revisions and complications the view in Descartes that consciousness provides direct access to our thoughts, and to our sensory thoughts in particular. Section 2 then makes clear Malebranche's commitment to Descartes's conclusion that such thoughts reveal immediately the existence of the self as a thinking thing. Yet, Section 3 emphasizes Malebranche's negative claim that what consciousness reveals about the nature of the soul is much less clear than what we know about the nature of the body through the idea of extension. Drawing on a distinction in the recent work of Thomas Nagel between objective and subjective viewpoints, this section offers an interpretation of Malebranche in which he claimed that consciousness is restricted to a subjective view of modifications of the soul that is inferior in kind to the objective view of bodily modifications that derives from the idea of extension.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism comprises fifty specially written chapters on Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Cartesianism, the dominant paradigm for philosophy and science in the seventeenth century, written by an international group of leading scholars of early modern philosophy. The first part focuses on the various aspects of Descartes's biography (including his background, intellectual contexts, writings, and correspondence) and philosophy, with chapters on his epistemology, method, aetaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical thought, and aesthetics. The chapters of the second part are devoted to the defense, development and modification of Descartes's ideas by later generations of Cartesian philosophers0in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere. The third and final part considers the opposition to Cartesian philosophy by other philosophers, as well as by civil, ecclesiastic, and academic authorities. This handbook provides an extensive overview of Cartesianism - its doctrines, its legacies and its fortunes - in the period based on the latest research.

The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism comprises fifty specially written chapters on Rene Descartes and Cartesianism, the dominant paradigm for philosophy and science in the seventeenth century, written by an international group of leading scholars of early modern philosophy. The first part focuses on the various aspects of Descartes's biography and philosophy, with chapters on his epistemology, method, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical thought, and aesthetics. The chapters of the second part are devoted to the defense, development and modification of Descartes's ideas by later generations of Cartesian philosophers in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere. The third and final part considers the opposition to Cartesian philosophy by other philosophers, as well as by civil, ecclesiastic, and academic authorities. This handbook provides an extensive overview of Cartesianism - its doctrines, its legacies and its fortunes - in the period based on the latest research.

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.