Books

CDs

Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

by Peter A. Schouls.
Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY & London, 2000.
171 pp.
ISBN 0-8014-3775-X.
Reviewed by David Topper, University of Winnipeg. Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E9 Canada. E-mail: Topper@Uwinnipeg.ca


Upon picking up this book and considering the title, I recalled an event many years ago, when I was a graduate student. At a party I met a philosophy major who was working on Descartes. At the time I was pursuing research for a paper on 17th century science and looking specifically at Newton and Descartes. Previously my exposure to Descartes was from philosophy classes and I was thus only familiar with his academic philosophy. But this research introduced me to another Descartes; indeed, I was struck by the similar mathematically abstract approaches to physical problems taken by Newton and Descartes. I saw Descartes in a new light, as a natural philosopher of the Scientific Revolution. I was thus eager to share this with the philosophy student. But she would have none of my argument. Descartes was not interested in such matters, she said. I must be mistaken. The discussion got nowhere; in fact, I recall her being rather hostile, so I dropped the topic. In light of this story, it is not surprising that I opened this book with some anticipation - especially because the dust jacket contains an abstract geometrical diagram.

Peter Schouls' focus is on Descartes' Discourse on Method and Meditations. Here Descartes takes the reader on an intellectual journey from complete skepticism (universal doubt) to absolute knowledge of one's existence (as a thinking body), the existence of God, our (extended) body, and accordingly an external (material) world of sensations - all clearly and distinctly arrived at by reason (the rational soul). The resulting dualism (mind/body) means that we humans (unlike "brute beasts," who have no reason) are not continually preoccupied with material needs (corporal and deterministic). (The corporal world of matter is mechanical, machine-like, rather like clockwork - a popular image in the 17th century.) This leads to the fundamental question posed in Schouls' book: according to Descartes, what must human nature be like in order for science to be possible?

By an act of (free) will, humans transcend the material and can, in turn, comprehend nature. The mind must be separate from nature (mind/body) for otherwise it too would be a mere mechanism, with no possibility of an act of (free) will and thus have no way of understanding nature. Freedom then becomes a condition for the development of science, which relies on acts of syntheses; but without freewill syntheses are not possible because hypotheses (essential for syntheses) require the use of imagination (which, in turn, rely on acts of freewill). Hence the possibility of science is bound-up with human freedom. Moreover, science requires all of the mind's faculties: not only reason and imagination, but memory, and, of course, sensation. Memory plays an important role in deductive logic, which is the essence of science for Descartes. And imagination is necessary for deduction to produce hypotheses. It is this emphasis on the intellectual powers of memory and imagination that is the focus of attention of Schouls' book. He point out their importance in Descartes' thought and their role in "the possibility of science," stressing that these faculties have generally been ignored by Cartesian scholars.

Descartes recognizes the utilitarian aspects of science but also asserts the epistemic claim, although he would not be classified as a pragmatist. The claim is based on the correspondence between the order in nature and the same order of human reason. Yet despite this correspondence, Descartes is not led to a realist position, which would be too strong a claim, for only God has such a viewpoint.

The "science" in the title of this book is neither concrete science as delineated in a textbook today nor the natural philosophy of Descartes' era. Rather it refers primarily to "deductive logic" and the philosophy of scientific knowledge. Moreover, much in this book is taken up with epistemological matters about the relations among reason, intellectual and corporal imagination, freedom, hypotheses, sensation, and the external world. Hence this book is mainly relevant only to academic philosophers, perhaps some philosophers of science, and probably few historians of science. Finally, and obviously, it provides no ammunition for my argument with that philosopher of yore - despite the suggestive dust jacket.

top