Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Machamer is professor of history and philosophy of science and associate director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. J. E. McGuire is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a resident fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science.

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"Original and well-grounded in the texts, Descartes's Changing Mind offers a comprehensive interpretation of Cartesian science. It also tackles questions concerning our knowledge of the new world of Descartes's physics and the mind's relation to that world. Machamer and McGuire take into account Descartes's entire career, from the late 1620s to the time of the Principles, showing that on key issues he altered his views significantly."--Dennis Des Chene, Washington University in St. Louis

"This book's main argument--that Descartes's views on metaphysics and natural philosophy changed over time--is significant because Descartes rarely gives the impression that his views have changed and scholars often treat them as a single block. This is the first book to focus on Descartes's changing views, and it is welcome."--Roger Ariew, University of South Florida

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"Original and well-grounded in the texts, Descartes's Changing Mind offers a comprehensive interpretation of Cartesian science. It also tackles questions concerning our knowledge of the new world of Descartes's physics and the mind's relation to that world. Machamer and McGuire take into account Descartes's entire career, from the late 1620s to the time of the Principles, showing that on key issues he altered his views significantly."--Dennis Des Chene, Washington University in St. Louis

"This book's main argument--that Descartes's views on metaphysics and natural philosophy changed over time--is significant because Descartes rarely gives the impression that his views have changed and scholars often treat them as a single block. This is the first book to focus on Descartes's changing views, and it is welcome."--Roger Ariew, University of South Florida

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Descartes's Changing Mind

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.....................................................................................................ixChapter One From Method to Epistemology and from Metaphysics to the Epistemic Stance.......................1Descartes's Early Work: The Rules...........................................................................5The World...................................................................................................14The Discourse on Method.....................................................................................24Chapter Two God and Efficient Causation....................................................................36A Historical Preamble.......................................................................................37God's Efficient Causation and the Introduction of Causa Secundum Esse.......................................45God, Time, and Continual Creation: The Emergence of Re-creationism..........................................59Causal Axioms and Common Notions............................................................................73Chapter Three Seeing the Implications of His Causal Views: The Response to His Critics.....................82God as Causa Sui: The High Tide of Descartes's Causalism....................................................83Eminent Containment, Transcendence, Divine Powers, and God's Causal Harmony.................................91Epistemic Teleology.........................................................................................102Chapter Four Body-Body Causation and the Cartesian World of Matter.........................................111The Current Debate on Body-Body Causation...................................................................111The Early Descartes.........................................................................................116Cartesian Conservationism...................................................................................119Three Questions of Metaphysics: Principles Parts I and II...................................................127Mature Motion...............................................................................................134The Place of Our Position in the Current Debate.............................................................157Chapter Five Mind, Intuition, Innateness, and Ideas........................................................164Intuition and Enumeration...................................................................................165Ideas and Descartes's New Theory of Mind....................................................................169Innate Ideas................................................................................................176Innateness and Sensory Ideas................................................................................183Innate Ideas: Present but Swamped...........................................................................186Innateness and Intellectual Memory..........................................................................188Common Notions, Eternal Truths, and Immutable Natures.......................................................193Chapter Six Mind-Body Causality and the Mind-Body Union: The Case of Sensation.............................198Sensation...................................................................................................199The Physical Side of Perception.............................................................................202The Mental Side of Perception...............................................................................209How the Soul Moves the Body, or Mind-to-Body Causation......................................................221The Nature of the Distinction between Mind and Body.........................................................224The Mind-Body (Soul-Body) Union.............................................................................232Epistemic Teleology and Dualism.............................................................................239References..................................................................................................243Index.......................................................................................................251

Chapter One

Descartes is always and ever concerned with knowledge. Around 1619 he begins his systematic philosophical work by starting to write, though never publishing, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii). In this work he lays out rules for directing the mind in its quest for knowledge. In 1649, toward the end of his life, he publishes the Passions of the Soul (Les Passions de L'me) in which he worries about the ways in which the passions affect our knowledge and how to control them. However, the Galileo affair in 1633 provoked a crisis in Descartes's intellectual development, the import of which has not been sufficiently recognized. Moreover, in replying to objections in 1640-41 to his Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditationes de prima philosophiae) he saw implications in his metaphysical position, the substance of which appears in the Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae) of 1644. These events constitute significant reasons why Descartes's philosophical position concerning how we know and what we may know is different at the end of his life from what it was when he began. Descartes's epistemic views cannot be separated from other aspects of his work. Indeed, his changing position on the what, how, and why of knowledge has major implications for, and is often suggested by, his views concerning God, causality, metaphysics, and the nature of humans. A further metaimplication of the claim we are making is that any scholar who cites early Cartesian texts in support of late Cartesian positions, or uses later texts in conjunction with early ones to support a reading of Descartes's philosophy, will inevitably fall into interpretative errors.

We begin with a general outline of what we seek to establish. In the Rules, and in his ever forthcoming The World (Le Monde ou trait de la lumire), Descartes's aim is to develop a method for revealing how things really are. After 1633, at the time The World is suppressed (to Mersenne, end of November 1633; AT 1:270-71; CSMK 40-41), he begins to change his epistemic method and strategy with the result that some metaphysical shifts are evident in his later thinking. The Discourse on Method (Discours de la Mthode) of 1637, his first published philosophical work, is transitional in that it still maintains many of his previous ideas concerning methods and procedures for establishing the natures of things. He has, however, already made the first move toward his epistemic stance, indicated by his inclusion of the foundational cogito argument (je pense donc je suis) in Part IV of the Discourse (AT 6:32; CSM 1:127). But he still seeks truth on the basis of intuiting, through abstraction from sensory experience, the true natures of things. By 1641, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes begins a subtle shift toward acknowledging the epistemic foundations of what we are able to know, and now places more stress on ascertaining the limits of human knowledge. Human knowledge, for Descartes, is finite in comparison to God's knowledge, a doctrine that he held, in one form or other, at least since 1630 (to Mersenne, April 15, 1630; AT 1:146; CSMK 23). But in Descartes's post-Meditations period, human knowledge becomes increasingly more circumscribed in its finitude, and is tied to a teleological understanding of the role of sensations in preserving the mind-body union, and also to the ways in which we establish scientific understanding of the workings of the world. This is Descartes's shift from his earlier methodological, sensory-based orientation to an epistemological perspective specifically integrated into his metaphysical views. It is the introduction of Descartes's epistemic stance. In respect to this shift, the Meditations is transitional. In that work, Descartes believes himself to be in the business of apprehending simple essences or natures. For example, he conceives bodies as endowed with active powers to affect the mind (Meditation VI; AT 7:79; CSM 2:55; see also the letter to Regius, January, 1642; AT 3:504; CSMK 208). In Meditation II he argues that the essence of a piece of wax is perceived by the intellect alone, and in Meditation V he lays out an ontology of true and immutable natures directly apprehended by the mind alone (AT 7:65; CSM 2:77).

Sometime between 1641, the date of the Meditations, and 1644, when he publishes the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes completes his epistemic turn. Pushed by his critics' objections to the Meditations, in the course of making his Replies he begins to articulate in detail the final form of his epistemic stance. He no longer holds that humans can know with certainty all the simple natures that are present in the world. What there is instead, which we find especially in Principles Part II is a form of epistemic perspectivalism concerning the limited character of human knowledge. This completes the shift that begins with what we call the epistemic teleology arguments of Meditation VI; namely, that what we may know, and the form in which it is known, constitutes what is necessary for our mind-body preservation. The epistemic consequence of this, as we hope to show, is that the world may contain many things that we neither know nor have the possibility of knowing. More specifically it means, for example, that we cannot know, or minimally we cannot know that we know, the real nature of substances, but only some of their useful attributes or particular modes that, yet, are still mind-independent. Concomitantly, the shift away from intuitions of simple natures is accompanied by a shift away from abstraction, as the epistemic model for gaining knowledge, to a model that requires many of our core ideas to be innate in the mind. Thus, in place of the earlier methods of abstracting by direct intuition and compounding from sensuous and nonsensuous experience, increasingly Descartes brings to the fore the view that knowledge always involves innate ideas. So at the end of his life, the conceptualization that he attributed previously to intuitions of simple natures is now largely accomplished by innate ideas, and a corresponding new doctrine concerning the establishment of complete, but not adequate, ideas. This is not to say that Descartes abandons the aim of intuitive knowledge across the board. On the contrary: as we will see in chapter 2, the cogito of Meditation II and the argument for God's existence in Meditation III rest on the belief that we possess basic and nonsensuous intuitions that are noninferential and non-propositional. Nor does he abandon abstract ideas. In the Principles they play a role in his account of universals that arise "from the fact that we make use of one and the same idea for thinking of all individual items that resemble each other" (AT 2:28; CSM 2:212).

Another important development needs to be noted. This is a shift from an early concept of idea that relates to corporeal bodies, to a later completely mental conception that begins to emerge around the time of the Meditations. In the Rules, The World, and the Treatise on Man, the latter based on extensive physiological investigations, Descartes's basic use of the term "idea" focuses on the movements of animal spirits in the brain and on what occurs in imagination. For example, in The World, we are told that "only those [impressions or patterns] which trace themselves on the [animal] spirits (esprits) at the surface of the [pineal] gland ... should be taken for ideas, that is to say, as the forms or images (les formes ou images) that the rational soul immediately considers" (AT 11:176-77). This "empiricist" orientation toward the nature of ideas is left behind by the time of the Meditations, though earlier in The World and the Discourse (AT 6:35; CSM 1:128) he also holds that ideas in some sense only occur in the mind (AT 11:3; CSM 1:81). In his mature thought, he takes idea "to refer to whatever is immediately perceived by the mind" (Third Reply to Hobbes, AT 7:180; CSM 2:127; and Schmaltz 1997, 37). Thus, ideas, understood in this general sense, are placed squarely within the disembodied mind, and the term is often used by Descartes interchangeably with the terms "thought" and "concept". As we hope to show in chapter 5, this development has significant implications for the growing importance of innate ideas in his late thinking. This in turn contributes to his mature account of perception and to the problem of the sorts of causal relata that obtain between mind and body, the topic of chapter 6. As we'll see, Descartes's handling of innate ideas is contextually nuanced and demands careful exposition. Moreover, we cannot assume that Descartes is forced to privilege innate ideas because he comes to see that his optical and physiological account of perception is inadequate. A cursory comparison with Descartes's discussion of grades of sensation in the Sixth Reply and the Optics is sufficient to dismiss this view. Indeed, it's precisely because Descartes understands the need for explaining how the mind accesses sensory input that he insists more and more that sensation has an intellectual content that the senses cannot provide.

We will argue that the Principles represent the first complete expression of Descartes's mature philosophy and contain the fruit of the shifts we have just enumerated. Put more succinctly, the epistemic stance Descartes establishes in the Principles is based on four core moves: the systematic employment of his causal principles for understanding the way in which God works in the world; the augmentation of the role of innate ideas; the demotion of the senses from a privileged position in the quest for human knowledge; and a reconceptualization of the nature of matter. At this time, he also makes clear that all knowledge of the world is limited to the extent it serves the teleological goal of mind-body preservation as well as the goal of establishing systematic and useful scientific knowledge of the world. To tell this story properly, Descartes's mature work, from the Replies to the Objections to the Meditations onward, needs to be compared with his earlier writings. The reading we give of Descartes's philosophy emphasizes the epistemic position sketched above and also considers his related metaphysical commitments and the role they play in his thought.

Finally, Descartes's epistemic stance, with its attendant view of causality, has implications for his conception of substance, and also for the positions he develops concerning the independence of mind and body and the mind-body union. We will argue that Descartes's "dualism" has to be understood in terms of what we call his epistemic teleology. This means that his understanding of the mind-body distinction fits uneasily into the philosophical categories standardly imposed upon it, such as substance or attribute dualism or trialism.

One caveat needs to be introduced here. Our claim is not that Descartes critically recognized all the changes and positions we ascribe to him in exactly the way we describe them. Nevertheless, we believe that what we attribute to him are views to which he was plausibly committed. At the same time, however, we are convinced that Descartes was not always fully and self-reflectively aware of these changes, especially when changing his mind in the face of criticism. In this respect he is like some contemporary philosophers who, having changed their mind about certain topics, insist that this is what they meant all along.

Descartes's Early Work: The Rules

We have claimed that Descartes's philosophy undergoes two kinds of major changes after 1633: from abstractionist methodology to epistemology and from an ontology of simple, knowable natures and common notions to the view that human knowledge of the world is limited to knowing some modes of some substances. We have also claimed that there is an additional shift leading to the ubiquity of innate ideas in his thinking, which is not to deny that earlier he considered certain ideas to be innate and to function in a more limited role. But the real shift is from ideas that represent external particulars to the view that the core of our understanding is innately constituted by ideas that are virtually nonrepresentational in their formal reality. Since this intellectual biography has implications for our reading of Descartes's philosophical views, we turn now to a chronological exposition of key aspects of his major works. We will sketch their content in order to mark clearly when the shifts take place and will weave into our narrative interpretative remarks concerning their significance.

Descartes was born in 1596. In or about the year 1619, he tells us (many years later in the Discourse of 1637), he began to think about philosophy and to ponder the nature of human knowledge in the sciences (Discourse, Part II; AT 6:12; CSM 1:16). "Science" of course, is the Latin scientia, and so the term covers all forms of natural knowledge: the word "philosophy" ("philosophia") has an equally wide-ranging use. Descartes recounts that he closeted himself (while in Germany) and began to think through the thoughts that will ultimately lead to the Meditations (1641). He recalls thinking about ridding himself of sensory-based opinions to which he had previously given credence, and of trying to discover new foundations for his thought. He sets himself rules to live by and then comes to the revelation that "of all those who have hitherto sought after truth in the sciences, mathematicians alone have been able to find any demonstrations" (Discourse, Part II; AT 6:18; CSM 1:120). So he sets about finding a "method which instructs us to follow the correct order, and to enumerate exactly all the relevant factors" (AT 6:21; CSM 2:21). He also remembers thinking that he shouldn't try to accomplish this prior to reaching an age more mature than his current twenty-three years.

When we turn to the Rules, it is clear that knowledge from sensory perception comes by "local motion" and "occurs in the same way in which wax takes on an impression from a seal" (Rule 12; AT 10:412; CSM 1:40). Yet "when an external sense organ is stimulated by an object, the figure which it receives is conveyed at one and the same moment to another part of the body known as the 'common' sense, without any entity passing from the one to the other (entis reali transitu ab uno ad aliud)" (AT 10:413-14; CSM 1:41). Still, "the power through which we know things in the strict sense is purely spiritual ... the cognitive power is sometimes passive, sometimes active; sometimes resembling the seal, sometimes the wax ... nothing quite like this power is found in material things. It is one and the same power, when applying itself along with the imagination to the 'common' sense, it is said to see, touch, etc.... when applying itself to imagination in order to form new figures it is said to imagine or conceive; and lastly when it acts on its own, it is said to understand" (AT 10:142; CSM 1:42). The goal of such examination is to distinguish carefully the "notions of simple things from those which are composed of them" (AT 10:417; CSM 1:43). Descartes goes on, "since we are concerned here with things only in so far as they are perceived by the intellect, we term 'simple' only those things which we know so clearly and distinctly that they cannot be divided by the mind into others which are more distinctly known. Shape, extension and motion, etc. are of this sort; all the rest we conceive to be composed out of these" (AT 10:418; CSM 1:44).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Descartes's Changing Mindby Peter Machamer J. E. McGuire Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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