Publicaties

Descartes repeatedly refers to a 'principle of life' and appears to make grand claims for its role in his natural philosophy. These claims have been taken at face value in the literature. This paper argues that there is no single principle underlying the operation of the Cartesian body. I show that Descartes’s account of physiology explains the operation of the living body through multiple interdependent systems, with no one system more ...

I argue that Descartes explains physiology in terms of whole systems, and not in terms of the size, shape and motion of tiny corpuscles (corpuscular mechanics). It is a standard, entrenched view that Descartes’s proper means of explanation in the natural world is through strict reduction to corpuscular mechanics. This view is bolstered by a handful of corpuscular-mechanical explanations in Descartes’s physics, which have been taken to be ...

A certain reading of Descartes, which we refer to as ‘the embodied Descartes’, is emerging from recent scholarship on L’Homme. This reading complicates our understanding of Descartes’s philosophical project: far from strictly separating human minds from bodies, the embodied Descartes keeps them tightly integrated, while animal bodies behave in ways quite distinct from those of other pieces of extended substance. Here, we identify three ...

I argue that Descartes is not a reductionist about life, but dissolves or eliminates the category entirely. This is surprising both because he repeatedly refers to the life of humans, animals, and plants and because he appears to rely on the category of life to construct his physiology and medicine. Various attempts have been made in the scholarship to attribute a principled concept of life to Descartes. Most recently, Detlefsen (2016) has ...

On the basis of Descartes’s account of the passions of the soul, we argue that current interoception-based theories of emotions cannot account for the hallmark of a passion of the soul, i.e., that its effects are felt as being in the soul itself. We also pay attention to the epistemic functions of the passions and to Descartes’s category of emotions that are caused and occur in the soul alone. Certain passions of the soul and certain internal ...

The physico-mathematics that emerged at the beginning of the seventeenth century entailed the quantitative analysis of the physical nature with optics, meteorology and hydrostatics as its main subjects. Rather than considering physico-mathematics as the mathematization of natural philosophy, it can be characterized it as the physicalization of mathematics, in particular the subordinate mixed mathematics. Such transformation of mixed mathematics ...

The first know criticism in writing of the Discourse on Method accused Descartes of being an atomist, and thereby set the tone of the debate that followed. The paper examines the reasons for Libert Froidmont’s critique, and for his misunderstanding with respect to Descartes’ physics. It argues that, by contrast, the Louvain professor of sacred scripture had good grounds for interpreting Descartes as a «Democritus revived» in matters of ...

The article advances a reading of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy that dispenses with “clear and distinct ideas”. Since Descartes’s lifetime, these concepts have become a trademark of his philosophy and a target for his critics, on account of their vagueness and inconsistency. The article provides evidence that, by and large, “clear and distinct ideas” were intended by Descartes to convey in simpler, catchier terms a much more ...

The volume offers the first large-scale study of the teaching of Descartes’s philosophy in the early modern age. Its twenty chapters explore the clash between Descartes’s “new” philosophy and the established pedagogical practices and institutional concerns, as well as the various strategies employed by Descartes’s supporters in order to communicate his ideas to their students. The volume considers a vast array of topics, sources, and ...

This paper presents the reactions to Descartes' account of the heartbeat expressed by the Leuven professors Fortunatus Plempius and Libertus Fromondus, reactions that also involved the Utrecht professor Henricus Regius. I show that the letters exchanged between Descartes and the two Leuven professors in 1637U+20131638 stirred a continuous debate, followed through a series of publications, up to the condemnations of Cartesianism in ...