A Companion to Descartes

With more than 30 newly commissioned essays, A Companion to Descartes details in unparalleled depth the work of the seventeenth–century philosopher–scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. Alongside discussion of his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind–body dualism, self–knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals, the volume provides in several essays a unique orientation to the intellectual, religious, and scientific contexts that were important to Descartes’s work. Concluding with discussions of the impact of Descartes’s work on subsequent generations of philosophers, the essays in this volume offer fresh and distinctive scholarly perspectives on this giant of the history of modern thought.

Notes on Contributors x List of Abbreviations xiv Introduction xv PART I THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT 1 1 Life and Works 3 STEPHEN GAUKROGER 2 Aristotelian Natural Philosophy: Body, Cause, Nature 17 DENNIS DES CHENE 3 Descartes and Augustine 33 CATHERINE WILSON 4 Descartes and the Legacy of Ancient Skepticism 52 CASEY PERIN PART II MATHEMATICS AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 67 5 Descartes and Galileo: Copernicanism and the Metaphysical Foundations of Physics 69 MICHAEL FRIEDMAN 6 Explanation as Confi rmation in Descartes’s Natural Philosophy 84 ERNAN MCMULLIN 7 Descartes and Mathematics 103 PAOLO MANCOSU 8 Descartes’s Optics: Light, the Eye, and Visual Perception 124 MARGARET J. OSLER PART III EPISTEMOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS 143 9 Descartes’s Method 145 MURRAY MILES 10 Descartes’s Use of Doubt 164 DAVID OWENS 11 Self–Knowledge 179 JANET BROUGHTON 12 Descartes on True and False Ideas 196 DEBORAH J. BROWN 13 Clear and Distinct Perception 216 SARAH PATTERSON 14 Causation Without Intelligibility and Causation Without God in Descartes 235 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA 15 Descartes on Substance 251 VERE CHAPPELL 16 Descartes and the Metaphysics of Extension 271 C. G. NORMORE 17 The Role of God in Descartes’s Philosophy 288 JOHN COTTINGHAM 18 The Cartesian Circle and the Foundations of Knowledge 302 JOHN CARRIERO 19 Cartesian Innateness 319 ALAN NELSON 20 Descartes on the Will in Judgment 334 LEX NEWMAN 21 Omnipotence, Modality, and Conceivability 353 LILLI ALANEN 22 Descartes’s Dualism 372 MARLEEN ROZEMOND 23 The Union and Interaction of Mind and Body 390 PAUL HOFFMAN 24 Animals 404 GARY HATFIELD 25 How to Engineer a Human Being: Passions and Functional Explanation in Descartes 426 AMY M. SCHMITTER 26 Descartes’s Ethics 445 LISA SHAPIRO PART IV DESCARTES’S LEGACY 465 27 Descartes’s Legacy in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Polemic 467 THOMAS M. LENNON 28 Contemporary Reactions to Descartes’s Philosophy of Mind 482 QUASSIM CASSAM 29 Descartes and the Phenomenological Tradition 496 WAYNE M. MARTIN 30 Our Debt to Descartes 513 BARRY STROUD Index 526

Janet Broughton is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Descartes’s Method of Doubt (2002). John Carriero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published widely in early modern philosophy.

"Good companions fulfil two more duties – they provide better ways of understanding the familiar and they also defamiliarise it by encouraging new slants and alerting us to relatively ignored issues: this companion does both.... A most attractive and wide–ranging addition to its field." ( Reference Reviews , Issue 6 2008)