Gaukroger, Stephen - Descartes- An Intellectual Biography.pdf - Biografie i autobiografie - kuszaba

Gaukroger, Stephen Reader in Philosophy, University of Sydney

Descartes: An Intellectual Biography

Print publication date: 1997

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003

Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-823724-2

doi:10.1093/0198237243.001.0001

Abstract: Stephen Gaukroger traces the development of Descartes's thought in the social, religious, and

intellectual context of seventeenth-century Europe. Gaukroger describes Descartes's upbringing and his

education at the Jesuit La Flèche collège, and shows the role these played in the development of his ground-breaking work in

philosophy and science. The book details the effects of his relationships with others on his work, both through collaboration and

through conflict. It discusses the history of the composition of his major works and details their structure and content. It documents

the correspondence, which played a major part in the development of his thinking, both before and after publication. The book

concludes, as it begins, with his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia on the subject of the passions.

Keywords: body , cosmology , Descartes , dualism , mathematics , metaphysics , mind , natural philosophy ,

optics , passions , philosophy , scepticism , science , seventeenth century , theory of method

Descartes

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Descartes

An Intellectual Biography

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX 2 6 DP

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First published 1995

First issued in paperback 1997

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction

outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,

Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gaukroger, Stephen. (b. 1950).

Descartes : an intellectual biography / Stephen Gaukroger.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Descartes, René, 1596-1650. 2. Philosophers—France—

Biography. I. Title.

B1875.G38 1995 194—dc20 94-31924

ISBN 0-19-823994-7

ISBN 0-19-823724-3 (pbk.)

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For my mother and father

Siobhan O'Connor and Herbert Wallace Sutcliffe Gaukroger

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Preface

Every great philosophy has so far been the self-confession of its originator, a kind of unintentional,

unconscious memoires . (Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse )

I have a vivid and happy memory of my first reading of Descartes, for it was with unbounded enthusiasm that I

devoured the Discourse on Method , sitting in the shade of a tree in the Borghese Gardens in Rome in the

summer of 1970, just before I started studying philosophy at university. But I cannot honestly say that my

enthusiasm was fuelled by my subsequent undergraduate courses on Descartes, which simply followed the

trade winds, in an obsessive but completely decontextualized way, through the tired old questions of the cogito

and the foundations for knowledge. So it was that my interest in the early seventeenth century came to be

stimulated by Galileo rather than Descartes, and it was to Galileo that I devoted my main attention while a

research student at Cambridge in the mid-1970s. While there, however, Gerd Buchdahl and John Schuster

revealed to me a different Descartes, a more authentic and vastly more engaging one, whom I only began to

explore properly ten years later. It is this Descartes who is the subject of this book, and I warn readers—if 'warn'

is the right word, as some may breathe a sigh of relief—that it is not the Descartes from whom philosophers

have made such a good living for decades that they will find here. But I have not simply set out to write the

history of science or cultural history. Descartes is, after all, the figure who stands at the beginning of modern

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philosophy, just as Plato stands at the beginning of ancient philosophy. While I shall argue that his philosophical

achievements are much more intimately linked to his interest in what subsequently have been considered

'scientific' questions than is commonly realized, my aim is not thereby to take Descartes out of the realm of

philosophy, but rather to throw light on how he did philosophy.

It is with some trepidation that I pursued this goal through the genre of intellectual biography, even though my

own early interest in philosophy had been fired by Simone de Beauvoir's incomparable intellectual

autobiography. People read intellectual biographies with different expectations, from the naïve attempt to

understand, at a distance as it were, how a 'great mind' works, to attempts to model one's own

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thought and career on that of someone one admires. Perhaps the most famous example of modelling is Thomas

Mann, who evidently tried to mirror in his own intellectual development the stages in Goethe's intellectual

development, although I think there are very many less explicit cases, and that biography generally has played

an important role in 'self-fashioning' since the nineteenth century. This makes it a rather delicate genre, both

from the point of the view of the reader and from that of the writer. Self-fashioning is part of the rationale behind

reading, and perhaps behind writing, intellectual biographies, but any self-fashioning will have to be very indirect

in the present case. While the thesis of Jacques Le Goff, that modernity did not begin and the Middle Ages did

not effectively cease until the French and Industrial Revolutions, is stronger than anything I would wish to argue

in this book, I have no doubt that the culture in which Descartes lived and worked is much more remote from

our own than is commonly recognized. This has consequences for biography, because a biography explores the

emotional life of its subject, and the more removed from our own culture our subject is, the deeper the problems

about how we are to succeed in this exploration. I have tried to be more responsive than my predecessors to

the difficulties that these issues raise, with the result that there is much greater concentration on the culture in

which Descartes worked than one finds in earlier biographies. But I am also very conscious of the problems of

over-contextualization, and I have tried to make sure that neither the subject of my biography, nor his

contribution, slips out of focus.

Anyone writing on Descartes cannot fail to acknowledge the excellent edition of Descartes' works by Adam and

Tannery, which appeared in the first decade of this century, and more recently in a revised edition. I am grateful

also to John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, The Philosophical Works of

Descartes (3 vols., Cambridge, 1985-91), which has set the standards of clarity and accuracy in the English

translation of Descartes. Although I have generally given my own translations, on a number of occasions I have

found that I have not been able to improve on that of Cottingham et al. , and have followed theirs.

In the course of taking on the project, I have inevitably run up debts to too many people to acknowledge all

those from whom I have learned. I have especially benefited from conversation and correspondence with Hans

Aarslef, David Armstrong, Gordon Baker, John Bigelow, Keith Campbell, Desmond Clarke, John Cottingham,

Jim Franklin, Helen Irving, Jamie Kassler, Tony Kenny, John Kilcullen, Katherine Morris, Lloyd Reinhardt, John

Schuster, William Shea, Michael Shortland, John Sutton, and John Yolton. An earlier version of parts of chapter

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appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas , vol. 52 (1992); but as for my other writings on Descartes, I have

changed my mind so significantly over the past two or three years that all of them are superseded by the

present book.

Part of the work was done while I was a visitor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the second half of 1991,

and I would like to thank the University of Sydney for granting me study leave at this time, and the President

and Fellows of Corpus Christi for the facilities they offered me. The project has been helped along enormously

by three grants from the Australian Research Council, which assisted me in numerous ways, including allowing

me relief from teaching in the second half of 1993, when the book was completed in draft.

S. G.

Sydney 1994.

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Contents

Chronological Table xiv

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Introduction 1

1. 'A Learned and Eloquent Piety'

Childhood, 1596-1606 15

The Christianization of Europe 24

The Civilizing Process 28

The Formation of a Gentilhomme 32

The Demise of the Municipal Collège 36

2. An Education in Propriety, 1606-1618

La Flèche 38

Christianity and the Classical Tradition 45

Res Literaria, 1606-1611 48

The Philosophical Curriculum 51

Dialectic, 1611-1612 53

Natural Philosophy and Mathematics, 1612-1613 55

Metaphysics and Ethics, 1613-1614 59

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme: A Choice of Career, 1614-1618

3. The Apprenticeship with Beeckman, 1618-1619

The Meeting with Beeckman 68

Beeckman's Micro-Corpuscularianism 69

Compendium Musicae 74

Falling bodies 80

Hydrostatics 84

Proportional Compasses and the Idea of a Mathesis

Universalis 89

4. The Search for Method, 1619-1625

Mirabilis scientiae fundamenta , November 1619 104

The Early Regulae , 1619/1620 111

Intuitus and the Doctrine of Clear and Distinct Ideas 115

The Doctrine of Analysis 124

Fundamentum inventi mirabilis 126

Intermezzo, 1621-1625 132

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5. The Paris Years, 1625-1628

Libertine Paris 135

The Discovery of the Law of Refraction 139

Mersenne, Mechanism, and the Problem of Naturalism 146

The Return to the Regulae , 1626 152

The Nature of Cognition 158

The Representation of Algebra 172

The Final Year in Paris 181

6. A New Beginning, 1629-1630

The Retreat from Society 187

Grinding the Anaclastic 190

The Formulation of a Metaphysics 195

The Pappus Problem and the Classification of Curves 210

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Parhelia and the Origins of Le Monde 217

The Dispute with Beeckman 222

7. A New System of the World, 1630-1633

The Structure of Le Monde 226

A Corpuscular Theory of Matter 228

The Laws of Nature 237

The Construction of a New World 249

The Nature of Light 256

A Mechanistic Physiology 269

Automata and Perceptual Cognition 276

The Condemnation of Galileo and the Abandonment of Le

Monde 290

8. The Years of Consolidation, 1634-1640

Amsterdam, 1634-1635 293

An Exercise in Autobiography, 1635-1636 304

Scepticism and the Foundations of a New Metaphysics 309

Publication and Critical Response 321

An Indian Summer, 1637-1639 332

Meditationes de Prima Philosophia 336

Public Brawl and Personal Grief, 1639-1640 352

9. The Defence of Natural Philosophy, 1640-1644

Religious Controversy 354

Recherche de la verité versus Principia Philosophiae 361

A Textbook of Natural Philosophy 364

The Task of Legitimation 377

The Legacy of the Principia 380

10. Melancholia and the Passions, 1643-1650

'A Doctor of the Soul' 384

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Mind in Body 388

A General Theory of the Passions

394

In Search of Peace, 1646-1649

405

The Move to Sweden 412

Death and Dismemberment 416

Notes 418

Biographical Sketches 471

Select Bibliography 481

Index 489

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Chronological Table

Born at La Haye (now Descartes) near Tours at his maternal

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