Abstract
As a practicing life scientist, Descartes must have a theory of what it means to be a living being. In this paper, I provide an account of what his theoretical conception of living bodies must be. I then show that this conception might well run afoul of his rejection of final causal explanations in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, I show how Descartes might have made use of such explanations as merely hypothetical, even though he explicitly blocks this move. I conclude by suggesting that there is no reason for him to have blocked the use of hypothetical final causes in this way.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
I use the term “science” and its cognates for ease of expression, mindful of the fact that our meaning of the term most closely aligns with Descartes ’ “natural philosophy”.
- 2.
I use the following abbreviations to refer to editions and translations of Descartes’ works: AT=Descartes 1964–76; CSM=Descartes 1985a; CSMK=Descartes 1985b; SV=Descartes 1989; SG=Descartes 1998.
- 3.
On the meaning of “machine”, specifically with respect to Descartes ’ medical philosophy , see Manning 2012.
- 4.
See Hatfield 1993 and Garber 1992, 13 for this account of the relation between metaphysics and physics. A different way of thinking about the relation between metaphysics and physics is put forth by Stephen Gaukroger who holds that “there was nothing internal to Descartes ’ project of natural philosophy that required metaphysical foundations, and there was nothing crucial to his natural philosophy that could only be generated from such metaphysical foundations” (Gaukroger 2002, 1–4). I leave aside these two competing visions of the relation between metaphysics and physics, since this debate does not impact my current project.
- 5.
- 6.
On this point, see Gaukroger 2000 and 2010. T.S. Hall (1970, 55–56) also points to the fact that Descartes provides reductionist explanations, and while Hall does not explicitly mention that Descartes does not thereby eliminate the category of life altogether, it is strongly implicit in his discussion of Descartes’ account of living bodies.
- 7.
- 8.
I avoid the use of “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”, using “internal” and “external” instead to avoid the technical meaning of the former pair in Descartes ’ philosophy. See Manning 2012 and Manning forthcoming. I engage with Manning’s discuss of intrinsic and extrinsic denominations in Sect. 7.3 below when I expand on what I mean by “internal ends” in Descartes.
- 9.
For a discussion of some of the material I cover herein with the chaos theory in mind, see Hatfield 2008.
- 10.
Des Chene 2000a, 20.
- 11.
Given my focus on the human body, along with other non-ensouled living bodies, my project departs somewhat from a project that focuses exclusively on medical philosophy to the extent that the latter is a field concerned with the health and illness of human beings.
- 12.
As with my use of “science”, I use the term “biology” mindful of the fact that this term and the cluster of sciences we now recognize by this term did not emerge until the late eighteenth century. I use this for ease of expression to capture Descartes ’ writings about living bodies.
- 13.
MacKenzie 1975, 2–3.
- 14.
- 15.
Bitbol-Hespériès 1990, passim takes heat as Descartes ’ theory of life.
- 16.
- 17.
Ablondi 1998, 183.
- 18.
See Bitbol-Hespériès 1990, 71.
- 19.
Thomas Fuchs makes this point (2001, 125). Genevieve Rodis-Lewis (1978) approaches this point too when considering AT II: 525 which allows that crystals may have a middle nature between living and non-living. It may be possible for Descartes to tolerate these grey areas in the same way that we tolerate difficult cases that seem to straddle the life-nonlife divide (such as viruses), but there is no need for this since there is a better theory of life forthcoming which does not require Descartes to accommodate the sort of grey area identified here.
- 20.
There were attempts in the early modern period to find structural equivalents of major organs across all living beings, including plants. The fact of these attempts might blunt the current criticism somewhat. See Delaporte, François [1979] 1982.
- 21.
See Des Chene 2001, 54ff for difficulties in identifying parts in Descartes .
- 22.
This is MacKenzie’s point. She holds that one causal component in Descartes ’ definition of life must be this fully abstract structural complexity, which permits the behaviors definitive of living bodies (MacKenzie 1975, 9).
- 23.
See Ablondi 1998 for an enlightening discussion of the structural complexity criterion.
- 24.
MacKenzie 1975, 10.
- 25.
Ibid. 8–9.
- 26.
Distelzweig 2015.
- 27.
Shapiro 2003, 433–434, including footnote 34.
- 28.
Des Chene 2001, 125ff.
- 29.
Shapiro 2003, passim.
- 30.
- 31.
See Carriero 2005.
- 32.
For a development of these points and their impact on Descartes ’ conception of the mind-body human composite, see Detlefsen 2013 .
- 33.
See, for example, Aquinas [1265–72] 1952–4.
- 34.
Manning (2012, 252) notes that it is a “serious misreading” to interpret Descartes ’ extrinsic denominations, such as the health or illness of a human being, as entirely mind-dependent and in no way in the human being itself. I agree, though I do not focus on extrinsic denomination.
- 35.
Manning (2012) deals with this section of Meditation VI by focusing on the historical meaning of “extrinsic denomination” and “intrinsic denomination”. My project, as will come clear, is a different one, and I believe it is, for the most part, compatible with Manning’s approach. There is one point of departure from Manning’s reading, which I address below.
- 36.
See Hatfield 2008, 416–17.
- 37.
I have chosen to focus on living and dead humans, and their symmetry with working and broken watches, rather than to focus on the dropsy case because of the special, theological, context of the Sixth Meditation, where Descartes is trying to make sense of God’s goodness in the face of apparent biological mistakes. While important (Brown 2013, 90ff), and I shall address this passage briefly below, I wish to keep the focus on the nature of living bodies and the ways in which understanding clocks can help us understand certain features of living bodies.
- 38.
For historical context that helps to bolster this idea, see Manning on extrinsic denominations (2012).
- 39.
- 40.
For helpful material on Aristotle on many of these points, see Kosman 1987.
- 41.
Michael Della Rocca has suggested (in correspondence) that in creating the eternal truths, God has imposed natures on things, thereby endowing them with an intrinsic character. Indeed, in the case of God’s creations, it might be more plausible to make the claim that his products can embody internal purposes. This would bolster my interpretation here, though my argument proceeds by analogy from the familiar case of human-made machines to the case of God-made machines.
- 42.
Tad Schmaltz has recently developed a convincing argument in favor of an unconscious, Aristotelian-type internal finality in human composites. See “Descartes ’s Critique of Scholastic Teleology ” (manuscript). The current conception of intrinsic ends relies more upon a conscious agent’s ability to signal her purposes, through very specific uses of matter, to another conscious agent. The current form thus leans more toward a Platonic form, albeit with the Aristotelian element of the purposes also being embodied in a non-conscious being.
- 43.
Brown 2013, 89–90.
- 44.
In Dialogues on Natural Religion, David Hume, of course, considers this question and provides a response that is especially interesting for the chaos theory, which I note is beyond the scope of this current project.
- 45.
Manning’s (2012, 262) approach to the issue of health in the human and extension of this teleological notion to non-human living bodies, is to employ the historical conception of extrinsic denominations to attribute teleological notions of health and illness to human bodies themselves, and then extending these conclusions to animals due to their likeness to the living human body. My approach is to focus on the process of making machines, and the intentional imparting of purposes in that process, and to find a way we can depend upon that without depending upon knowledge claims about God’s purposes.
- 46.
- 47.
- 48.
There is a moment in the Principles when he seems to allow for the latter use of hypotheses , but a careful reading of this passage leaves open the distinct possibility that what is going on in the passage is Descartes ’ recognition of their lack of certainty, not their mere instrumentality. (See PP III, §44; AT VIIIa, 99/CSM I, 255). The preponderance of Descartes’ claims indicates that he takes the role of the natural philosopher to be the pursuit of true causes of phenomena.
- 49.
For accounts of Descartes ’ maturation on the relation between hypotheses and scientific epistemology, see Clarke 1989, chapter 7, and 2011 and McMullin 1990, 2000 and 2008. For a much earlier account of many of these themes recently developed by Clarke and McMullin, including a discussion of hypotheses, see Garber 1978.
- 50.
Mariotte 1678, 624.
- 51.
Du Châtelet 1740, chapter 4.
- 52.
For discussions on why Descartes ’ hypotheses are not merely speculative, see for example, McMullin 2008, 89 and Clarke 1989, 141–4. The latter makes a distinction between arbitrary and reasonable hypotheses, with reasonable hypotheses being assumptions, which can be systematized and unified into a system, ideally bound by laws.
- 53.
References
Ablondi, Fred. 1998. Automata, living and non-living: Descartes’ mechanical biology and his criteria for life. Biology and Philosophy 13: 179–186.
Aquinas, Thomas. [1265–72] 1952–4. Truth. Trans. Robert W. Mulligan, S.J., James V. McGlynn, S.J., and Robert W. Schmidt, S.J. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co.
Ariew, Roger. 1983. Mind-body interaction in Cartesian philosophy: A reply to Garber. Southern Journal of Philosophy 21(supplement): 33–37.
Bitbol-Hespériès, Annie. 1990. Le Principe de Vie Chez Descartes. Paris: J. Vrin.
Brown, Deborah. 2013. Cartesian functional analysis. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90(1): 75–92.
Canguihelm, George. 1965. La connaissance de la vie. Paris: J. Vrin.
Carriero, John. 2005. Spinoza on final causality. Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 2: 105–147.
Clarke, Desmond. 1989. Occult powers and hypotheses: Cartesian natural philosophy under Louis XIV. Oxford: Clarendon.
Clarke, Desmond. 2011. Hypotheses. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy in early modern Europe, ed. Catherine Wilson and Desmond Clarke, 249–271. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Rosa, Raffaella. 2007. A teleological account of Cartesian sensations? Synthese 156: 311–336.
Delaporte, François. [1979] 1982. Nature’s second kingdom: Explorations of vegetality in the eighteenth century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Des Chene, Dennis. 2000a. Life’s form: Late Aristotelian conceptions of the soul. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Des Chene, Dennis. 2000b. Life and health in Cartesian natural philosophy. In Descartes’ natural philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton, 723–735. New York: Routledge.
Des Chene, Dennis. 2001. Spirits and clocks: Machine and organism in Descartes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Descartes, René. 1964–76. Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols, eds. C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: J. Vrin. Cited with abbreviation AT, followed by volume and page number.
Descartes, René. 1985a. The philosophical writings of Descartes, 2 vols. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited with abbreviation CSM, followed by volume and page number.
Descartes, René. 1985b. The philosophical writings of Descartes, vol. 3: The correspondence. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited with abbreviation CSMK, followed by page number.
Descartes, René. 1989. The passions of the soul. Trans. Stephen H. Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Cited by abbreviation SV followed by page number.
Descartes, René. 1998. The world and other writings. Ed. Stephen Gaukroger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited by abbreviation SG followed by page number.
Detlefsen, Karen. 2013. Teleology and natures in Descartes’ sixth meditation. In Descartes’ meditations: A critical guide, ed. Karen Detlefsen, 153–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Detlefsen, Karen. forthcoming. Du Châtelet and Descartes on the roles of hypothesis and metaphysics in natural philosophy. In Feminism and the history of philosophy, eds. Eileen O’Neill and Marcy Lascano. Kluwer Academic Press.
Distelzweig, Peter. 2015. The use of Usus and the function of Functio: Teleology and its limits in Descartes’s physiology. Journal of the History of Philosophy 53: 377–399.
Du Châtelet, Émilie. 1740. Institutions de physqiue. Paris: Prault Fils.
Friedman, Michael. 2008. Descartes and Galileo: Copernicanism and the metaphysical foundations of physics. In A companion to Descartes, ed. Janet Broughton and John Carriero. Malden: Blackwell.
Fuchs, Thomas. 2001. The mechanization of the heart: Harvey and Descartes. Trans. Marjorie Grene. Rochester: Rochester University Press.
Garber, Daniel. 1978. Science and certainty in Descartes. In Descartes: Critical and interpretive essays, ed. Michael Hooker, 114–151. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Garber, Daniel. 1992. Descartes’ metaphysical physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gaukroger, Stephen. 2000. The resources of Descartes’ mechanist physiology and the problem of goal-directed processes. In Descartes’ natural philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger, John Andrew Schuster, and John Sutton, 383–400. London: Routledge.
Gaukroger, Stephen. 2002. Descartes’ system of natural philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gaukroger, Stephen. 2010. Descartes’ theory of perceptual cognition and the question of moral sensibility. In Mind, method and morality: Essays in honour of Anthony Kenny, ed. John Cottingham and Peter Hacker, 230–251. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grene, Marjorie. 1986. Die Einheit des Menschen: Descartes unter den Scholastikern. Dialectica 40: 309–322.
Grene, Marjorie. 1991. Descartes among the scholastics. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.
Gueroult, Martial. 1952. Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, vol. 2. Paris: Editions Montaigne.
Hall, T.S. 1970. Descartes’ physiological method: Position, principles, examples. Journal of the History of Biology 3: 52–79.
Hatfield, Gary. 1993. Reason, nature, and God in Descartes. In Essays on the philosophy and science of René Descartes, ed. Stephen Voss, 259–287. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hatfield, Gary. 2008. Animals. In Companion to Descartes, ed. Janet Broughton and John Carriero, 404–425. Malden: Blackwell.
Hoffman, Paul. 1986. The unity of Descartes’s man. The Philosophical Review XCV: 339–370.
Hoffman, Paul. 1999. Cartesian composites. Journal of the History of Philosophy 37: 251–270.
Johnson, Monte Ransome. 2005. Aristotle on teleology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kosman, L.A. 1987. Animals and other beings in Aristotle. In Philosophical issues in Aristotle’s biology, ed. Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox, 360–391. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
La Porte, Jean. 1928. La finalité chez Descartes. Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie 2(4): 366–396.
Lauden, Larry. 1981. Science and hypothesis: Historical essays on scientific methodology. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Lennox, James. 1985. Plato’s unnatural teleology. In Platonic investigations, Studies in philosophy and the history of philosophy 13, ed. Dominic J. O’Meara, 195–218. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press.
Lennox, James. 1992. Teleology. In Keywords in evolutionary biology, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
MacKenzie, Ann Wilbur. 1975. A word about Descartes’ mechanistic conception of life. Journal of the History of Biology 8(1): 1–13.
Manning, Gideon. 2012. Descartes’ healthy machines and the human exception. In The mechanization of natural philosophy, ed. Sophie Roux and Dan Garber, 237–262. Kluwer: New York.
Manning, Gideon. forthcoming. Extrinsic denomination. In Descartes Lexicon, ed. L. Nolan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mariotte, Edme. 1678. Essai de logique. In Oeuvres, volume ii.
Mayr, Ernst. 1992. The idea of teleology. Journal of the History of Ideas 53(1): 117–135.
McMullin, Ernan. 1990. Conceptions of science in the scientific revolution. In Reappraisals of the scientific revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, 32–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McMullin, Ernan. 2000. Hypothesis. In Encyclopedia of the scientific revolution: From Copernicus to Newton, ed. Wilbur Applebaum. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.
McMullin, Ernan. 2008. Explanation as confirmation in Descartes’s natural philosophy. In A companion to Descartes, ed. Janet Broughton and John Carriero, 84–102. Malden: Blackwell.
Menn, Stephen. 2000. On Dennis Des Chene’s physiologia. Perspectives on Science 8(2): 119–143.
Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève. 1950. L’individualité selon Descartes. Paris: J. Vrin.
Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève. 1978. Limitations of the mechanical model in the Cartesian conception of the organism. In Descartes: Critical and interpretative essays, ed. Michael Hooker, 152–170. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sakellariadis, Spyros. 1982. Descartes’s use of empirical data to test hypotheses. Isis 73(1): 68–76.
Schmaltz, Tad. Manuscript. Descartes’s critique of scholastic teleology.
Shapiro, Lisa. 2003. The health of the body machine? Or seventeenth century mechanism and the concept of health. Perspectives on Science 11(4): 421–442.
Simmons, Alison. 2001. Sensible ends: Latent teleology in Descartes’ account of sensation. Journal of the History of Philosophy 39(1): 49–75.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Detlefsen, K. (2016). Descartes on the Theory of Life and Methodology in the Life Sciences. In: Distelzweig, P., Goldberg, B., Ragland, E. (eds) Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7353-9_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7353-9_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-7352-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-7353-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)