Reviews for Cambridge Companion to Descartes

The average rating for Cambridge Companion to Descartes based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-07 00:00:00 Ida Howard [ I should like to retract some portion of my initial assessment. Descartes was primarily a scientist, in the loose sense of the term, and less of a philosopher; least among his oeuvre is what might properly be considered philosophy. Thus i think it is perfectly appropriate for the essays to emphaze the scientific.:] The Cambridge Companion Series continues to be an outstanding resource for the student, the scholar, and those in between. This volume is a number of essays on various aspects of Descartes' thought, particularly his metaphysics, epistemology, and science. The contributors, who are well-known early modern philosophy experts (the early modern philosophy community is relatively small'go to 3 or 4 conferences and you'll meet virtually all the 'who's whos'), aim to explain sufficiently the important areas of Descartes' thought while also engaging with the scholarly debate in those areas. Thus, the authors both describe the basics of their respective topics as well as prescribe a course for interpreting the topic as they see best. The authors, therefore, exposit, explicate, and evaluate to the conclusion for which they respectively adhere. In doing so, the authors (remember, they all know one another to some degree and many are even friends) charitably formulate those interpretations and arguments with which they disagree, resulting in an exemplary edition of accessible Descartes papers. There is also a detailed bibliography. The Cambridge Companion Series of major philosophers is intended to provide a full range of the achievements and ideas of the thinker in one volume. This volume on Descartes comes close to fulfilling this intention but misses the par just a bit. This is to say nothing negative about the quality of the essays, all of which are excellent. Rather it is to say that the editor's selections lean a bit to the scientific. The essays in this volume are very much geared toward Descartes' philosophy of science'his mathematics and physics. One good thing about this is that much explanation is devoted to scholasticism and the various ways in which Descartes negotiated his way through scholastic conceptions of substance, causation, motion, and evidence, sometimes retaining scholastic ideas, sometimes modifying them, and sometimes jettisoning them altogether. This emphasis on Descartes' philosophy of science, therefore, gives the reader a nice bonus in the form of a little crash course in scholastic ontology and epistemology. (This content is something most readers will not have learned, even if they've taken a number of philosophy courses. The reasons for this are at least twofold. First, most introductory courses cover Plato and Aristotle, then immediately jump to Descartes. If you're lucky, you'll get either Augustine or Aquinas before Descartes. If Augustine, you'll not get any scholasticism; if Aquinas, you'll probably only get scholasticism by association'-most intro instructors only have time to cover Aquinas' conception of the soul or his Five Ways. In doing so, you might get a brief nod to scholastic Aristotelianism but usually not. The second reason is that most intro instructors don't know much about medieval philosophy. It's sad, but true. So, when you do have an instructor who knows medieval philosophy, particularly scholastic philosophy, feel privileged and proceed to shower this person with gifts, preferably money'not apples'because this person probably makes less than most kindergarten teachers.) The weaknesses of this book'it's over-emphasis on the science' also yields one of its strengths'good coverage of those scholastic notions with which Descartes contended and struggled. A further aspect of Descartes' thought that is virtually omitted from this volume is his ethical views. You get a mention here and there, but no essay fully devoted to it. For this, the standard secondary work continues to be John Marshall's Descartes' Moral Theory. In defense of the editor, however, Descartes' entire corpus consists of very little work on this area; furthermore, Descartes' ethics is virtually unheard of in college philosophy departments, except by those very few who specialize in such matters (did I mention John Marshall?). But do not be disappointed, all the usual Cartesian suspects are lined up and well interrogated: mind/body, cogito, ontological argument, clear and distinct perceptions, cartesian circle, etc. (That was so hackneyed, but pointing it out is more so; and so is pointing out that I'm pointing out, ad infinitum.) I'm aware of another criticism to this volume, one to which I do not subscribe. Some people have complained that this book was written entirely by 'analytic' philosophers. This is the sort of thing that disgruntled and confused 'continentalists' write when what they're reading isn't predominately poetry, aphorisms, and nifty quips. I have no idea what Descartes scholarship would look like if it were to fall into the hands of the continentalists, but it would cease to be scholarship, instead it would take on the appearance of toilet water--the kind that is blue because of that thing in the back where the water fills up. (Yes, continentalists do exist'they are the ones that mysteriously seem to disappear from rigorous graduate programs in philosophy without having obtained their degrees.) They speak of this volume as being too 'analytic'and hence consisting of biased interpretations, as if there were some other way of doing philosophy, silly fellows. Of course, they don't bother to explain what it is about being analytic that entials bais. I suggest they put down the Descartes scholarship and pick up Baudrillard or Holderlin; Derrida or Heidegger. Continentalists must learn to pay attention to claims, the raw material out of which arguments are crafted. To do otherwise sometimes can be meaningful, profound, and important, but can rarely be philosophy. One of my favorite essays in this volume is Clarke's " Descartes' Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Revolution," the theme of which is twofold. First, that an understanding of Descartes' contribution to natural philosophy'his concept of science'requires acute sensitivity to the historical context in which Descartes' was working. Second, that this historical context generated epistemological and methodological problems which acted as constraints on Descartes', and other natural philosophers', ability to navigate the transition from the formal scholastic models to the new experimental mechanistic models of science. For this reason, while Descartes was a pivotal figure of the scientific revolution, he was not able to fully jettison the prevalent conceptual presuppositions of the schoolman, the scholastics. Descartes' scientific ideas were developed during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. During this time, Descartes contributed to two related developments in natural philosophy: changes in scientific practice, and changes in scientific explanation. These changes, resulting in a new model of science, occurred because the natural philosophers at the time challenged and repudiated the widely held scholastic model of science. Clarke claims that the scholastic model of scientific knowledge consisted of a number of key notions. One was that all genuine knowledge claims are demonstratively certain or necessary; another was the claim that our knowledge of physical phenomena is jointly derived from sensory evidence and God's guarantee of reliable cognitive faculties; and a further notion was the employment of hylomorphic descriptions of natural phenomena: all individual things and their respective activities were reduced to explanations of composite entities consisting of matter and form. Scholastic accounts of the natural order became the object of Descartes' philosophical critique. Contrary to the scholastics, Clarke shows that Descartes argued against the scholastic model when Descartes argued that it was the unreliability of sense perception that allows for scientific knowledge. Because there is a difference between the content of our subjective sensations and the objective causes of the objects that produce our sensations, we cannot demonstrably argue from our descriptions of subjective sensations to descriptions of objective causes. Sensation thus yields contingent knowledge of physical phenomena, and the physical causes of our ideas are best explained with reference to hypothetical assumptions'hypotheses'about material causes and effects, represented by mechanical models, not resemblance assumptions about formal causes. Clarke notes that Descartes' hypotheses fundamentally alter how scientific knowledge is explained. First, because hypothetical demonstrations refer solely to the size, shape, and motion of the particles of material bodies; second, because Descartes thought that explanations of physical phenomena invoking the distinction between matter and form were vacuous, pseudo-explanations: reference to forms inhering in things neither accounts for the production of the phenomena to be explained, nor renders the phenomena capable of observation. While it may be true that a magnetic body attracts certain bodies because it has a "magnetic form", the principle of substantial forms on which this account depends is itself in need of explanation. In contrast, Clarke notes that Descartes' explanations are made plausible by analogically representing the microscopic particles of material phenomena with large-scale models, thus fundamentally altering the way in which science is practiced; for instance, unobservable light particles are represented with billiard ball size wooden spheres. Descartes adoption of hypotheses shifts the sense of demonstration to one of contingency in which scientific knowledge is something less than that of pure mathematics; hence a Cartesian explanation is a hypothesis that may be false or significantly inaccurate with reference to the phenomena it purports to explain. According to Clarke, the limitations of hypothetical explanations motivated Descartes to ground them in an indubitable metaphysical foundation. Clarke notes that at this point in Descartes' thinking about the relative certainty of scientific explanations he is unable to discard the conceptual categories of the scholastics. Scholastic knowledge claims admitted of two kinds: the demonstrably certain, and the uncertain, amounting to mere opinion. Because Descartes thought that hypotheses, while less than certain, were more plausible than uncertain opinion, he attempted to describe the relative accuracy with which models and hypotheses represent reality within the bounds of this scholastic dichotomy. Clarke thinks that Descartes' efforts here are a doomed attempt to classify the relative probabilities of the method of hypothesis with the unsophisticated concepts of certainty and uncertainty available to him. Clarke claims that Descartes tries to subsume his hypothetical scientific reasoning to a few demonstrable metaphysical principles; but Clarke claims that Descartes fudges between some principles as certain and others as probable, revealing the ambivalence in Descartes' philosophy of science. Clarke notes that despite Descartes' efforts to ground natural science in metaphysical certainty, he was still left with many difficulties relating to complex experimentation, observation and interpretation dependence, and variable identification when modeling. Cartesian science, Clarke insists, nonetheless, differs markedly from scholastic science despite sharing certain conceptual categories. Descartes was committed to hypothetical explanations, not certain demonstrations, referring solely to matter in motion, not occult properties. [ I should like to retract some portion of my initial assessment. descartes was primarily a scientist, in the loose sense of the term, and less of a philosopher; least among his oeuvre is what might properly be considered philosophy. Thus i think it is perfectly appropriate for the essays to emphaze the scientific.:]

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-26 00:00:00 Charles Kessler A compilation of contemporary views on Descartes philosophy. The subjects that are covered include a look into his life, and the scholastic world in which he was born and thought, as well as his views on Metaphysics, Epistemology, Physics, Psychology and ethics. It finishes with an interesting essay on his influence in the 2 centuries following his death. An important book for anybody wishing to study Descartes, or simply wishing to know more about the man who has been called the Father of Modern Philosophy.