Abstract
Louis de la Forge (1632–1666) was a medical doctor and an early defender of the Cartesian philosophy. He is best known for his views on causation and his development of occasionalism within the Cartesian school. Commentators such as Balz (1932), Garber (1987), and Nadler (1998) have focused on the consequences of La Forge’s views for Cartesian metaphysics and physics, with little consideration of La Forge’s medical philosophy. We argue that La Forge provides a sophisticated version of Cartesian mind-body dualism, and he advances a mechanistic account of the animal spirits, corporeal memory, and a host of other topics relevant to Descartes’s conception of the human body-machine. We examine La Forge’s lengthy Remarques in the French edition of Descartes’s L’Homme de Rene Descartes et un Traite de la Formation du Foetus (1664, 1667) where he advances Descartes’s account of the generation and working of the animal spirits and its relevance to the human body-machine. We also examine La Forge’s Traité de l’esprit de l’homme et de ses facultez et fonctions, et de son union avec le corps (1666), where he explains the functions of the soul while defending dualism and the mechanism of the body-machine against scholasticism. We conclude that La Forge advances Descartes’s account of the generation and workings of the animal spirits and their interaction with the human soul, giving us an important vantage point to see the reception and development of the Cartesian medical philosophy in France.
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Notes
- 1.
Baillet 1691, 1.vii, ch. xix, 398–99.
- 2.
Hall 1969, xli.
- 3.
La Forge 1974, xxxiv–xxxv. Author translation.
- 4.
- 5.
La Forge 1664, 407. Author Translation.
- 6.
Descartes 1984–91. CSM I, 138–139.
- 7.
Des Chene 2005, 245–260.
- 8.
Descartes 1984–1991 gives only cursory treatment of intellectual memory. See, for example, his exchange with Burman, CSMK III, 336, and his letter to Huygens, CSMK III, 216.
- 9.
Another example of La Forge advancing Descartes ’s work, not discussed here, is found in Wilkin 2008. Wilkin discusses how La Forge takes Descartes’s explanation of how spirits move through the pores of the brain and the heart to be distributed throughout the body when a passion is felt to explain how some mother’s passions can yield a birthmark while others do not. La Forge develops the above Cartesian notion by appealing to the speed by which the animal spirit s pass through the mother’s body. There must be sufficient exertion of force to “send the animal spirit whizzing through various nerves and arteries so that they pull other spirits along” thus generating the speed to create various stimuli that can generate a birthmark in some cases but not in others. La Forge draws on Descartes account “of how different passions (in the strictly corporeal sense ) produce different bodily responses…differences are determined by the pathway taken by the animal spirit” but it is La Forge who attempts to ground the explanation of how birthmarks are generated into a mechanical hypothesis and provide a corporeal explanation for their cause. 552–555.
- 10.
Zittel 2011, 221.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
- 13.
Wilkin 2003, 60. Thanks to Gideon Manning for drawing our attention to this paper.
- 14.
La Forge 1664,185.
- 15.
Descartes , 1984–1991. Passions of the Soul I, 8, CSM I: 331.
- 16.
“I supposed, too, that in the beginning God did not place in this body any rational soul or any other thing to serve as a vegetative or sensitive soul, but rather that he kindled in its heart one of those fires without light which I had already explained, and whose nature I understood to be no different from that of the fire which heats hay when it has been stored before it is dry, or which causes new wine to seethe when it is left to ferment from the crushed grapes.” Descartes , 1984–1991. CSM I, 134.
- 17.
Des Chene 2001, 21.
- 18.
Descartes 1998,187.
- 19.
Fermentation during the early modern period was understood in various ways. Antonio Clericuzio 2012 discusses the view of acid as a fermenter and a cause of digestion and further elaborates the process of digestion as a purely chemical, purely mechanical, or a combination of both chemical and mechanical digestion. 335. Catherine Wilson 1995 discusses how by the nineteenth century, Pasteur differentiated between bad and good infection when the theory of infectious diseases was combined with the chemistry of fermentation . 141.
- 20.
La Forge 1664, 206.
- 21.
La Forge 1664, 205–206.
- 22.
La Forge 1664, 210.
- 23.
Des Chene 2005, discusses the issue of muscle movement. Des Chene showcases the difference between Perrault and Descartes by their views on the work that animal spirit s do in case of muscles. For Perrault animal spirits “operate to relax the muscles and not to tighten or shorten them. They shorten of their own accord after being stretched” while according to Descartes that “the entry of the animal spirits into a muscle shortens it.” Perrault recognizes that the animal machine is like a mechanical machine however, the machine requires a “mover” and a pure machine is incapable of providing it.
- 24.
La Forge 1664, 220.
- 25.
La Forge 1664, 241.
- 26.
La Forge 1664, 244. Cf. Descartes 1984–1991; CSMK III: 225–226. Letter to Vorstius, 19 June 1643; “These animal spirit s flow from the cavities of the brain through the nerves to all the muscles of the body, where they serve to move the limbs. Finally they leave the body by transpiration that cannot be detected–not merely those which pass along the nerves, but others as well which merely travelled in the arteries and veins. Whatever leaves the animal’s body by this undetectable process of transpiration necessarily has the form of spirits … Only the animal spirits are pure; but they vary in strength depending on the differences in the particles which make them up.” According to Descartes more can be found on vapours and exhalations and winds in Chapters 1, 2, 3, of his meteorology, “… for what I wrote there of vapours, exhalations and winds can easily be applied to spirits …” See also, Des Chene 2001, 37. “The primary difference between blood-particles, and the aereous particles and spirits, is size.” Particles that are spirits, which are solid and excited, are unlike the aereous particles; spirit particles do not linger in the lungs but rather make the added journey into the aorta and toward the brain.
- 27.
La Forge 1664, 302.
- 28.
- 29.
La Forge 1664, 331–332.
- 30.
La Forge 1997, 178.
- 31.
- 32.
Steensen 1669.
- 33.
- 34.
Lennon and Easton 1992, 91.
- 35.
La Forge 1664, 306.
- 36.
La Forge 1997, 163.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
La Forge 1664, 385–386.
- 39.
La Forge 1997, 181–182.
- 40.
La Forge 1664, 407–408.
- 41.
La Forge 1997, 143.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid., 150–151.
- 45.
Ibid., 177.
- 46.
Ibid., 201.
- 47.
Ibid., 202.
- 48.
Ibid., 204.
- 49.
Descartes 1984–1991. Passions, Part I.
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Easton, P., Gholamnejad, M. (2016). Louis de la Forge and the Development of Cartesian Medical Philosophy. 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_9
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