Abstract

These two books on Descartes are alike only in the evident intelligence and scholarship that have gone into them. They come from very smart people who have at their disposal an impressive array of Descartes’s texts as well as other material. The result is that both books are exceedingly rich and rewarding, and are so beyond any indication possible here. Otherwise, they are very different in their scope, in their aims, in their methodology, in their style and level of difficulty, in the use to which they will be put, and in their subject matter. Without knowing of Rozemond’s book, Vinci in his introduction identifies the fork that nonetheless separates his book from hers. According to Vinci, there are two divergent strains of argument to be found in Descartes’s Meditations: one is an epistemological project relating to worldviews, the other an ontological project relating to a dualism of mind and body. In dealing with the tension between them, he says, the “reconstruction” of Descartes must go beyond exegetical considerations to philosophical interest. “Different philosophers will make different assessments, but my own is that it is Cartesian epistemology rather than Cartesian theory of mind that is of more abiding philosophical interest”. Rozemond makes just the opposite assessment, at least if her book is judged by this standard.