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, and the concepts of health and illness. Des Chene begins (...) by surveying works that Descartes would likely have encountered, from late Aristotelian theories of the soul to medical literature and treatises on machines. The Cartesian theory of vital operations is examined, with particular attention to the generation of animals. Des Chene also considers the role of the machine-model in furnishing a method in physiology, the ambiguities of the notion of machine, and of Descartes’s problem of simulation. 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 regarded exploration -- begun in his previous book, Life’s Form -- of the scholastic and Cartesian sciences as well as the dialogue between these two worldviews. Introduction 1 Part One - Tales of the Bête-Machine [ 1 ] - Self-Movers 13 [ 2 ] - Where Do Machines Come From? 32 [ 3 ] - The Uses of Usus 53 Part Two - Machines, Mechanisms, Bodies, Organs [ 4 ] - Tools of Knowledge 71 [ 5 ] - Jeux D’Artifice 103 [ 6 ] - Unity of the Body 116 Conclusion 153 Bibliography 159 Index 177. (shrink)

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.

Militante et réflexive, l’histoire des femmes a aussi besoin d’exprimer ses doutes et ses inconforts. Rattrapée par l’actualité, la violence et nombre d’événements cruels et tragiques, par des incertitudes majeures vécues par l’ensemble du monde intellectuel, elle pose aujourd’hui en cet article collectif des interrogations et des inquiétudes. Ce travail à plusieurs (les participantes du Groupe d’histoire des femmes du CRH) cherche à mettre à plat ce qui actuellement se dérobe à notre connaissance, en partant de notions-clés souvent utilisées, comme (...) consentement, sexualité, écriture, patriarcat, etc. Chacune de ces notions est discutée à la lumière des brouillages actuels, des temporalités nouvelles, de l’avènement triomphant du corps marchandise, de la pauvreté grandissante, etc. (shrink)

“Good governance” may be viewed as governance that effectively promotes human rights, human security and human development. This article discusses human security analysis, which in certain ways offers an integration of these “human” perspectives together with a “social” orientation, by combining a person-focus with systematic investigation of the environing systems of all sorts: physical, cultural, organizational. The importance of such analysis is illustrated through the example of climate change impacts and adaptation. The article presents applications of a human security framework (...) in governance, for policy analysis, planning and evaluation issues in climate change and other fields. The concluding section suggests that human security analysis may provide a way to apply insights from social quality analysis to detailed case investigation and policy analysis, while reducing macro-sociological abstraction and neglect of the natural environment. (shrink)

The language of ‘human security’ arose in the 1990s, including from UN work on ‘human development’. What contributions can it make, if any, to the understanding and especially the valuation of and response to the impacts of climate change? How does it compare and relate to other languages used in describing the emergent crises and in seeking to guide response, including languages of ‘externalities’, public goods and incentives, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis? The paper examines in particular the formulations in those (...) terms in Stiglitz's Making Globalization Work and Stern's The Economics of Climate Change and Blueprint for a Safer Planet, and how these authors are left groping for frameworks to motivate the changes required for global sustainability. It undertakes comparison also with the languages of human development and human rights, and suggests that, not least through enriching our skills of ‘narrative imagination’, the human security framework supports a series of essential changes in orientation—in our conceptions of selfhood, well-being and situatedness in Nature—and supports a required greater solidarity and greater awareness of our inter-connectedness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René DescartesDennis Des CheneRichard Watson. Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes. Boston: David R. Godine, 2002. pp. viii + 375. Cloth, $35.00.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.Descartes is a case in point. Until a few years ago, there was in English no satisfactory biography. Now there are three: an "intellectual biography" by Stephen Gaukroger, the Descartes of Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, and Watson's. Gaukroger dwells on Descartes's natural philosophy, especially in the early years. Only after 300 pages does he reach the period of the Discourse, Descartes's first published work. Rodis-Lewis offers a more even-handed treatment, the fruits of a lifetime of study. Her Descartes resembles, not the modern scientist or professional philosopher, but the ancient sage for whom metaphysics is a once-in-a-lifetime affair, and even natural philosophy subordinate to wisdom. Watson's Descartes is an altogether more worldly type, born into a family of lawyers, well-connected, touchy [End Page 113] about his place in social and scientific circles, and not all that interested in what we think of now as philosophy. Nor, for that matter, is Watson: you will look in vain for an analysis of the Meditations, a discussion of method, or a definition of générosité. (Watson does conclude, I should note, with a discussion of Descartes's doctrine on the soul, whose title might well have been "The future of an illusion" if Freud had not used it already.)If you like your philosophy uncluttered by context, if you find it worthwhile to read or write about "Cartesian skepticism" or "Cartesian dualism" without troubling yourself to understand who the historical Descartes was, or what might have moved him to confront the skeptics and save the soul, then Watson is not for you. It is emphatically a Life, not a Life and Works. It is, moreover, a life in the manner of many modern biographers, in which the biographer, rather than conceal himself behind the curtains of scholarly convention, figures into the narrative, retracing the steps of Descartes's passage to Italy, examining the baptismal certificate of Descartes's illegitimate daughter Francine, and eating lunch at the Queen Kristina restaurant "next door to the house in which Descartes died" (303). The quality of a biography thus written depends in part on the personality of its author (and in the case of Cogito Ergo Sum, the author's wife, who intervenes more than once on the side of common sense during their peregrinations). Watson is, to my mind, an agreeable companion, dedicated to the search for biographical truth, impatient with hagiographic fog and time-hallowed error, down-to-earth in his assessment of Descartes's motives and circumstances.One example to show the differences among the three biographies. In November 1618 Descartes met the future Latin schoolmaster Isaac Beeckman in Breda. Beeckman records with enthusiasm their joint endeavors in physico-mathematics over the next few months (Gaukroger has the details). It seems clear that the impetus for studying the various problems mentioned in Beeckman's Journal came from Beeckman, who had been pondering physical questions since 1613 or before. Descartes's contribution, at least at first, was his immense mathematical skill. Their interests lay largely within the "mixed mathematics" of the period, especially hydrostatics and mechanics. They also discussed music, an aspect of the "new science" now often neglected (but see H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music [Dordrecht, 1984]). On New Year's day 1619 Descartes presented Beeckman with his Compendium musicæ (Gaukroger 74, Rodis-Lewis 51/29). A decade later, Descartes, having heard that Beeckman had appropriated the Compendium to himself, became angry and eventually, late in 1630, dismissed Beeckman with a masterpiece of de haut... (shrink)

En 1983, un groupe de femmes japonaises francophiles, très intéressées par le féminisme français et les changements rapides de la vie des femmes en France depuis les années 1970, créent la Société Franco-japonaise des Études sur les Femmes. Le but est de promouvoir une meilleure compréhension entre les deux cultures et de développer des liens avec les Françaises sur un grand nombre de questions féminines. Le projet se révéla vite être un succès. Parmi les études entreprises par la Société, l’analyse (...) comparée de l’histoire des Françaises et des Japonaises, domaine très peu exploré alors, a suscité un vif intérêt chez les participantes. Cet article revient sur vingt années de réflexion, de recherche, et d’échange par un groupe d’historiennes non-professionnelles sur les relations entre histoire et expériences de vie personnelles. Il nous montre comment l’étude de l’histoire des femmes dans un contexte international peut être fructueuse et bénéfique, et combien une libre discussion collective, sans tabous, sur ce sujet peut éveiller ou approfondir la conscience féministe. (shrink)

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 ...

This article offers to outline a direction for a decolonial political theory based on Aimé Césaire’s and Frantz Fanon’s thoughts. In doing so, I will first discuss some work of comparative political theory that could be associated with an attempt to decolonize political theory. Rather than a systematic critique of these works, this article aims to outline some of their limits from a decolonial perspective, such as their embedment in a continental ontology/logic, and their over-emphasis on methodology that can lead (...) to an instrumental account of politics. In contrast, I will argue for a decolonial existential political theory that grounds its investigation in what Frantz Fanon called ‘the zone of nonbeing’ and that takes politics as first philosophy. To make my point, I will discuss Aimé Césaire’s Letter to Maurice Thorez and Frantz Fanon’s Political Theory of the Damnés. (shrink)

Atticus vecut au IIeme siecle, probablement a la fin du regne de Marc-Aurele. Contre les doctrines de son temps qui cherchait a fusionner les theories de Platon et d'Aristote, Atticus pronait un platonisme epure, loin de tout eclectisme. Cette position philosophique lui valut l'hostilite de ses contemporains, notamment d'Ammonius, et compromit sa reputation aupres de toute la tradition posterieure, si bien qu'aujourd'hui nous ne connaissons ses oeuvres que de maniere indirecte, par Eusebe de Cesaree pour la plus grande partie. Ainsi (...) n'avons-nous de ses ecrits qu'une vision partiale autant que partielle. Il semble avoir ecrit un Traite de l'ame, et des commentaires de grands textes de Platon, comme le Timee ou le Phedon. La presente edition regroupe l'ensemble des fragments attribues, a ce jour, au philosophe neo-platonicien, notamment le texte Contre ceux qui se flattent d'interpreter Platon par Aristote. Une riche notice introductive fait le point sur les connaissances relatives a l'auteur et a son oeuvre, et fournit toutes les informations necessaires a la bonne intelligence cette vaste nebuleuse du neoplatonisme. De judicieux paralleles sont dresses en particulier avec Ammonius. Des notes accompagnent la lecture et sont developpees, en fin de volume, par des notes complementaires. L'ouvrage est en outre enrichi d'un Index Verborum ab Eusebio, d'un Index Fontium ainsi que d'un Index auctorum ab attico laudatorum. (shrink)

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" has been abandoned. The point is reinforced when one considers the general divine ends which must be invoked in cases of aborted action. In them no individual agent attains its end. Yet Nature as a whole continues to act toward ends. I suggest that those general ends, to which Suárez, for example, refers, may have served later philosophers, especially Malebranche, in combining the Cartesian notion of law with a teleological interpretation of nature that Descartes, for his part, rejected. (shrink)

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.

The science of the soul exceeds all other parts of philosophy not only in “dignity and exactness”, but also in “usefulness, necessity, charm, and, above all, in difficulty”.1 As the body is the subject of health and disease, so too the soul is the subject of virtue and vice; and just as the physician must devote great effort to knowing the body, anyone who treats morals “must take care to have a clear understanding of things pertaining to the scientia de (...) anima”.2 To be mistaken about the soul, in the way of materialists or the impious Averroes, is to leave “the good without reward, and evil without punishment”, and thus to “uproot all good morals, all laws and Republics”.3 The study of the soul is inescapably a prolegomenon to moral philosophy and to theology. But because it studies what is common to all living things, the science of the soul also prepares the way for the study of particular plants and animals, just as physics precedes the study of elements and mixtures.4 The natural philosopher deals with six kinds of bodies: the simple incorruptible bodies of the heavens, the simple but corruptible terrestrial elements, imperfect mixtures (ice, comets), perfect inanimate mixtures (metals and pre-. (shrink)

Experience makes its mark on us in many ways. It leaves traces; it instills habits. A trace, as I define it here, is a quality of the soul or mind which is distinguished by its content, its intentional object. Aristotelian species and Cartesian ideas are traces. A habit I take, following Suárez, to be a quality of the soul which assists in the acts of a power of the soul, enabling them to be performed more easily and promptly. I will (...) use the Latin word habitus for habits so understood. This paper examines, in a preliminary way, the fate of habitus in early modern philosophy. In comparing just two authors, Suárez and Descartes, it can only suggest, schematically, how that fate is to be understood. My suggestion is that the role of habitus in Suárez’s psychology is occupied in Descartes’ psychology by association, understood mechanistically, and by resolution—the mind’s act of binding itself to be guided by certain judgments. These, being acts of will directed toward ideas, are rather traces than habits. No doubt the history is not so simple as this contrast makes it appear. Already, we will see, in Suárez and Descartes, we must complicate the scheme: in Suárez’s case, by the fact that some habitus seem to be expressible as rules; in Descartes’, by phenomena resembling the Suárezian habitus. Nevertheless I think the scheme offers a useful first approximation to the early modern history of habit. (shrink)

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.

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 is quite often (...) the opposite of wonderful: phenomena that might excited wonder are proved to be unworthy of it, just by showing that they are the productions of an automaton. The automaton is, first of all, a machine, and therefore an artifact, human or (if the metaphor becomes literal) divine. It offers a model of intelligibility—to use Peter Dear’s term—for a certain class of natural phenomena, namely those we find in living things. But Descartes wants from it something more. In Descartes’ usage, a machine is that which makes itself available not just to “mechanical” explanation, but to a complete explanation, an explanation that makes all others superfluous. Not all machines, of course, are automata. Two further components figure in the notion. One is that automata are typically imitative. From the automata thaumata of Aristotle’s De Motu animalium to the nymphs of Salomon de Caus’s fountains, many automata are likenesses, partaking both of the iconic (to use Peirce’s term) and the symbolic. Moving sculptures proceed moving pictures by over two thousand years. They succeeded if they convinced their audiences that they could do what their prototypes did—where the doing is typically restricted to some few sorts of act. The wind-up mouse skitters across the floor like a real mouse; but it does not eat, nor does it seek the.. (shrink)

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 contrast between Suárez’s and René Descartes’ accounts of the (...) causal medium are historically significant for understanding the rise of mechanical philosophy during the seventeenth century. (shrink)

. 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 living things, but also a basis for attributing purposes to them, and thus for defining health and disease in soulless creatures. (shrink)

This paper presents a structured comparison of the social quality approach with the UNDP-led 'human development' approach and its sister work on 'human security'. Through clarification of their respective foci, roles and underlying theoretical and value assumptions, the paper suggests that partnership of the social quality approach with these 'human' approaches appears possible and relevant for each side.

Being-at-home in a particular, determined, world is dangerous for thinking. For thinking to be thinking/becoming, one should not get too comfortable. For thinking is to not arrive back home, in the same place one begins. But how to escape the world that has created who you are, gave you purpose and a past? How to make sure the future is not a repetition of the Same? How to break away from something that you need? In this article, my aim is (...) not to give one more solution to this fundamental problem that is in essence an ethical problem. For providing a refuge, a new theory, a new methodology, would be providing a new island for those who realise that a flood is endangering their own island. My aim is to exercise the craft of exilic thinking as a way to deal with the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” Exilic thinking as a craft of fragilising the self establishes a matrixial borderspace through which the impossible becomes possible. (shrink)

Review of Anne Dufourmantelle's In Praise of Risk, trans. with an introduction by Steven Miller.

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.