Simply Descartes E-Book

Kurt Smith

• Herausgeber: Simply Charly
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Serie: Great Lives
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 217

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

“Simply Descartes is the perfect one-stop-shop for all matters Cartesian. Smith presents Descartes’s entire system from the ground up, building from metaphysics and epistemology to physics and morality. In some ways, he even goes one step further than the master himself for, with the benefit of hindsight and of the work of leading scholars, Smith reconstructs the system in a neat, orderly, clean and concise way, extracting the disparate pieces from Descartes’s many works scattered over many years. For those seeking entry into Descartes, or into philosophy in general, as well as for those seeking a refresher on this foundational thinker, you can do no better than this book.”—Andrew Pessin, author of The Irrationalist: The Tragic Murder of René Descartes and Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College

René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, France, on March 31, 1596. He attended a Jesuit college and studied law for two years, but he soon gave up formal academics to immerse himself in “the great book of the world.” In 1618, he joined the army, where he became interested in military engineering and expanded his knowledge of physics and mathematics. Then, one night in 1619, he experienced what he described as divine visions, which inspired him to create a new mathematics-based philosophy. He spent the next 30 years writing a series of works that radically transformed mathematics and philosophy and, by the time of his death in 1650, he was recognized as one of Europe’s greatest philosophers and scientists. 

In Simply Descartes, Professor Kurt Smith offers the general reader an opportunity to get better acquainted with the philosophy of the man who, as much as any individual, helped shape our contemporary way of thinking. Written in simple, nonacademic language and based on the best recent scholarship, Simply Descartes is the ideal introduction to Descartes’ life and work—from the famous Cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) to the development of analytic geometry, to the nature of God. 

Not to mention which, if you’ve ever wondered whether all living things are nothing more than fancy machines, or whether life is really a Matrix-like dream, you’ll be amazed to discover that a 17th-century philosopher was asking (and answering) the same things!

Leseprobe

Simply Descartes

Kurt Smith

Simply Charly

New York

Copyright © 2018 by Kurt Smith

Cover Illustration by José RamosCover Design by Scarlett Rugers

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-1-943657-34-6

Brought to you by http://simplycharly.com

Contents

Praise for Simply DescartesOther Great LivesSeries Editor's ForewordPrefaceAcknowledgements 1. Descartes’s System: The Big Picture 2. Mind 3. The Search for Truth and Certainty 4. Body 5. Physics and the Mechanization of Life 6. Human Beings 7. Descartes's LegacySuggested ReadingAbout the AuthorA Word from the Publisher

1

Praise for Simply Descartes

“Simply Descartes is the perfect one-stop-shop for all matters Cartesian. Smith presents Descartes’s entire system from the ground up, building from metaphysics and epistemology to physics and morality. In some ways, he even goes one step further than the master himself for, with the benefit of hindsight and of the work of leading scholars, Smith reconstructs the system in a neat, orderly, clean and concise way, extracting the disparate pieces from Descartes’s many works scattered over many years. For those seeking entry into Descartes, or into philosophy in general, as well as for those seeking a refresher on this foundational thinker, you can do no better than this book.”

—Andrew Pessin, author of The Irrationalist: The Tragic Murder of René Descartes and Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College

“Descartes said philosophy should begin by making no assumptions. He would be happy with this book because it makes no assumptions about what the reader knows, and then builds a clear and accurate picture of the most important thinker in modern philosophy.”

—Thomas M. Lennon, author of The Plain Truth: Descartes, Huet, and Skepticism and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario

“Simply Descartes is an impressive work on several levels. Professor Smith is simultaneously engaging, accessible, scholarly, precise, and bold both in scope and interpretation. Situating the Cartesian philosophical and (what we now call) scientific system in historical and intellectual context, Smith offers an outstanding overview of everything from Descartes’s metaphysics and epistemology (and even some of Spinoza’s and Malebranche’s) to his underdeveloped, but still present, moral theory. This is at once a fabulous introduction to Descartes himself as well as the scholarly debates surrounding the interpretation of Descartes’s work.”

—Kristopher Phillips, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Utah University

“In this inviting little book Kurt Smith, author of the acclaimed Matter Matters, introduces the systematic thought of René Descartes. In easily understandable, non-technical language, Smith makes it abundantly clear why Descartes is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the past and why his thought is still relevant in many respects. I heartily recommend Simply Descartes as a non-academic entry into this fascinating philosopher that is backed up by reliable scholarship.”

—Alan Nelson, Harold J. Glass Professor Director of Graduate Studies The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Kurth Smith’s Simply Descartes is, simply, the real Descartes, with all the intellectual rigor, made accessible to the non-philosopher. It is a first-rate intellectual biography that exposes the systematicity of the Cartesian program and can help almost anyone understand why ‘I think, therefore I am’ is worthy of being philosophy’s most famous quote.”

—Seth Bordner, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama

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Other Great Lives

Simply Austenby Joan Klingel RaySimply Beckettby Katherine WeissSimply Beethoven by Leon PlantingaSimply Chekhov by Carol ApollonioSimply Chomskyby Raphael SalkieSimply Chopinby William SmialekSimply Darwinby Michael RuseSimply Dickensby Paul SchlickeSimply Diracby Helge KraghSimply Einsteinby Jimena CanalesSimply Eliot by Joseph MaddreySimply Euler by Robert E. BradleySimply Faulkner by Philip WeinsteinSimply Fitzgerald by Kim MorelandSimply Freud by Stephen FroshSimply Gödel by Richard TieszenSimply Hegel by Robert L. WicksSimply Hitchcock by David SterrittSimply Joyce by Margot NorrisSimply Machiavelli by Robert FredonaSimply Napoleonby J. David Markham & Matthew ZarzecznySimply Nietzsche by Peter KailSimply Proust by Jack JordanSimply Riemann by Jeremy GraySimply Sartre by David DetmerSimply Tolstoy by Donna Tussing OrwinSimply Stravinsky by Pieter van den ToornSimply Turing by Michael OlinickSimply Wagner by Thomas S. GreySimply Wittgenstein by James C. Klagge

3

Series Editor's Foreword

Simply Charly’s “Great Lives” series offers brief but authoritative introductions to the world’s most influential people—scientists, artists, writers, economists, and other historical figures whose contributions have had a meaningful and enduring impact on our society.

Each book provides an illuminating look at the works, ideas, personal lives, and the legacies these individuals left behind, also shedding light on the thought processes, specific events, and experiences that led these remarkable people to their groundbreaking discoveries or other achievements. Additionally, every volume explores various challenges they had to face and overcome to make history in their respective fields, as well as the little-known character traits, quirks, strengths, and frailties, myths, and controversies that sometimes surrounded these personalities.

Our authors are prominent scholars and other top experts who have dedicated their careers to exploring each facet of their subjects’ work and personal lives.

Unlike many other works that are merely descriptions of the major milestones in a person’s life, the “Great Lives” series goes above and beyond the standard format and content. It brings substance, depth, and clarity to the sometimes-complex lives and works of history’s most powerful and influential people.

We hope that by exploring this series, readers will not only gain new knowledge and understanding of what drove these geniuses, but also find inspiration for their own lives. Isn’t this what a great book is supposed to do?

Charles Carlini, Simply Charly New York City

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Preface

A guy walks into a bar and drinks like there’s no tomorrow. Near closing time, the bartender says, “I think you’ve had enough.” The guy replies, “I think not!” (poof!) The guy disappears. This joke, and others like it, play off of a phrase famously associated with French philosopher René Descartes: I think, therefore I am.

Understanding Descartes and his place in intellectual history are important—the origin of lame jokes aside. His work inspired a new way of looking at things, ushering in what today we refer to as the modern period. In fact, Descartes is affectionately called the first modern philosopher. Although you may have only recently become acquainted with his name, you very likely hold some of the views that he is responsible for having introduced into intellectual discourse—including the belief that you and your mind are one and the same thing; the belief that your mind is only temporarily related to your body and can survive “death;” the belief that your mind is more than capable of acquiring the truth independently of any authoritative social institution; the belief that “living” bodies are machine-like; the belief that all geometrical problems can be translated into algebraic form and solved via the rules of algebra—to list only a few.

Descartes (pronounced Day-cart) was born in 1596, in La Haye, France. His mother died roughly a year after his birth. His father, a magistrate, sent Descartes and his brother and sister to live with their grandmother. At about 10 years of age, he entered college at the Jesuit school in La Flèche. After graduating, he studied at the law school in Poitiers, then joined the Dutch army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. During his time in Breda, where he served, he met Dutch philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who rekindled in him a deep interest in mathematics and physics (then known as natural philosophy), such interests having originated when a student at La Flèche. This not only inspired Descartes to author a short treatise on music, which focused on the mathematics of sound, but also a large work that he originally titled Le Monde (The World).

As Le Monde approached its printing date, Descartes pulled it from the presses, having learned of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Italian philosopher Galileo Galilei. He was imprisoned for adapting the Copernican model of the solar system, which was contrary to the Church’s teachings. That was around 1633. In Le Monde, Descartes said that he too had embraced some of Galileo’s controversial views. He figured that the same fate that befell Galileo could also happen to him.

Descartes spent the rest of his philosophical career, if we can call it that, reproducing some version of Le Monde. His first attempt resulted in the Discourse on the Method, published in 1637. This work included a brief autobiography (from which we learn of his initial interests in mathematics and physics as a young student), a brief account of how he took his system to be grounded, and three “scientific” texts—the Geometry, the Optics, and the Meteorology. Some claim that these three scientific essays were versions of the material originally included in Le Monde. The Discourse turned out to be quite popular. He then turned his focus to writing an intense examination of the ground of his system—the Meditations on First Philosophy. Although akin to the Discourse, the Meditations, published in 1641, goes into much greater detail as to how one must proceed when setting out to discover the ground of his system.

Descartes returned to the proverbial drawing board and authored the Principles of Philosophy, published in 1643, which highlighted the physics portion of his system, though Part One gives a brief run-through of the arguments introduced in the Meditations. Description of the Human Body, written about 1647, was the start of a reworking of the Treatise on Man, the latter very likely also originally included as part of Le Monde. And, The Passions of the Soul, Descartes’s final work, finished around 1649, extends his system into taking a closer look at the psychology of man, where the makings of a moral theory lurk.

The structure and order of his work align, though not perfectly, with how philosophical systems of the period were presented to readers—logic and metaphysics, physics, biology, human anatomy and physiology, human psychology, human social structures, culminating ultimately in moral and political theory. Descartes said nothing about social structure, and barely scratched the surface with respect to moral theory, tidbits of which are found in the Passions. And he said almost nothing about political theory. In this book, we’ll take a careful look at Descartes’s philosophical system—the whole kit and caboodle. We will aim to get the “big picture,” and see how everything hangs together.

Here’s the end of his story. In 1649, Descartes set out for Sweden to tutor Queen Christina. He was charged with teaching the Queen philosophy, a task that he seemed not to have enjoyed since the sessions started at five in the morning. Some foreboding things occurred at the opening of the new year, one of which was Descartes’s friend, Hector-Pierre Chanut (1601-1662), coming down with a nasty respiratory infection. Chanut recovered and would go on to become the French Ambassador to Holland. So, his story ended well. Descartes helped Chanut get through his health crisis, but wound up ill himself. Now, the odds are that he simply caught whatever virus Chanut had. But some have suggested that something more sinister was afoot and that Descartes, and maybe even Chanut too, had been poisoned. Although in early February there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel with respect to recovery, things took a turn for the worse, and Descartes died early morning on February 11, 1650. Sixteen years later an envoy from France, Hugues de Terlon, arrived in Stockholm to recover his remains. He secretly exhumed the body, put it in a copper coffin, and brought it back to Paris.

There’s a wonderfully macabre story about how Descartes’s skull was allegedly stolen on the way to France. The Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris, is now home to Descartes’s alleged skull. The story is that Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius had read in the newspaper that it was up for sale. He purchased it. But American philosopher Richard Watson, who has held the skull in his hands, suggested that it is more than likely that of a little girl, and not that of a man in his mid-50s (Descartes died at around fifty-four years old). Museum curators disagree, of course. Besides, among other things, the front of the skull bears this inscription (in Latin): This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius (Cartesius is the Latinized form of Descartes).

We cannot be certain that the skull in question belonged to the great philosopher. What we do know for sure is that his work has transcended centuries and is still influential today.

In the book that follows, when citing Descartes’s writings, I refer to the now-famous 11-volume collection, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (AT). And, whenever possible, I use the English translations (three volumes) of John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (CSM), and the third volume including translations by Anthony Kenny (so, volume three is CSMK). I place citation information in parentheses in the body of the text, the AT and CSM (or CSMK) volumes cited by volume and page number.

Kurt Smith Bloomsburg, PA

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Simply Descartes’ publisher, Charles Carlini, who approached me about writing this book. I was delighted and honored to do it. The view presented in this book is the culmination of more than two decades of focused study on René Descartes and his philosophical work, though I suspect that this can be traced back even further, to my first early modern philosophy course at UC Irvine with Robert Sleigh, Jr., who in those days would spend some of the winters as a visiting scholar in sunny Southern California. The greatest influences on my thinking about Descartes—scholars and friends who have inspired and influenced me—include (in alphabetical order) Roger Ariew, Seth Bordner, Ken Brown, Jill Buroker, Vere Chappell, Patricia Easton, Dan Garber, Geoffry Gorham, Paul Hoffman, Nick Jolley, Anthony Kenny, Tom Lennon, Steven Nadler, Alan Nelson, Larry Nolan, Calvin Normore, Donald Rutherford, Tad Schmaltz, Lisa Shapiro, Ed Slowik, and Margaret Wilson. I’d be surprised if we couldn’t find portions of this book that each would vehemently reject. But the fact remains that the view here was born from my encounters with these wonderful minds. It is to these unwitting partners in crime that I dedicate this book, though they’ll no doubt hate huge hunks of it. But it’s my book, so what are they going to do? Last, but certainly not least, I thank my editor, Helena Bachmann, whose thoughtful and careful editorial suggestions made the book a better read.

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Descartes’s System: The Big Picture

In the Preface to the French edition of his Principles of Philosophy (1647), Descartes wrote:

Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. (AT IXB 14; CSM I 186)

This image is helpful in better understanding Descartes’s insight into how human knowledge was ultimately structured. It says something about the relationships that the various sciences have to one another. At bottom was the science of metaphysics. Like the roots of a tree, it grounded and fed all the other sciences. Next was the trunk, representing the science of physics. From physics, three principal sciences emerged—medicine, mechanics, and morals. Of course, the flipside of this was to think of the latter three sciences as being underwritten by physics, and physics as being underwritten by metaphysics. Given that the relation is transitive, the three principal sciences must be understood as being underwritten by metaphysics.

Metaphysics

The term “metaphysics” has a long history in philosophy. Today, it denotes an area of philosophy that focuses on theories of reality—on theories of what is. Included in metaphysics is what is sometimes called an “ontology”: a theory of being. Even in terms of everyday, ordinary life we find the connections between the commonsense notions of reality, what is, and being. To be sure, talk of being and reality makes metaphysics sound like physics. But it isn’t. Physics presupposes certain notions established in the metaphysics, notions that are formulated prior to physics—notions like substance, mode, quality, event, cause, effect, motion, law, being, existence, body, time, space, impetus, origin, and so on; notions that early modern natural philosophers (some of whom were later called physicists) in turn presupposed in their reasoning and in their explanations.

An ontology isn’t solely an artifact of academic philosophy. It is found hard at work even in everyday, ordinary life—our very language expresses an ontology. When being taught how to communicate with others, you were introduced to an ontology, regardless of whether your parents or teachers understood it to be such. Consider the simple statement:

The ball is blue.

In ordinary usage, this statement would presumably refer to or pick out some state-of-affairs in the world. You very likely call such a state-of-affairs a fact. You also probably believe that if the above statement picks out a fact in the world, the statement is said to be true. On the other hand, if it fails to pick out a fact, the statement is said to be false.

The statement is a linguistic item; it is a piece of language. The fact is an ontological item; it is a piece of reality. Truth and falsity, then, emerge, as they do above, from our noting the relationship between a statement and a fact. Of course, not every statement is made true by the existence of a corresponding fact. Some statements—definitions, for example—are true, but not because of some fact. But the statements of interest to us at the moment are those that are said to be true because of some fact. This is an ancient theory of truth. We find it expressed as early as in the works of Aristotle (384BCE-322BCE). In philosophy, the term “epistemology” denotes the area of study that focuses on theories of knowledge. As you might expect, since truth and falsity are constituents of any theory of knowledge, epistemology includes a study of theories of truth and falsity, too. Thus, truth and falsity are epistemological items. We’ll look more carefully at Descartes’s epistemology in Chapter 3. Right now, we will stay focused on working out a more general picture of Descartes’s system, the ground of which is established in his metaphysics.

As with most statements, the above one (“The ball is blue”), can be analyzed into its constituent parts. The word-phrase “The ball” is the subject of the sentence; the word-phrase “is blue” is the predicate. As the statement picks out a fact in the world, its constituents, the subject and predicate, also pick out items of the ontology—in this case, a thing and a quality or property that this thing possesses. The thing is the ball, and the quality or property that it is said to possess is the property of beingblue. Notice that the “is” in the statement—“The ball is blue”—isn’t the “is” of identity. That is, we’re not saying that the ball is identical to being blue. If we were saying that, then the sky, which is also blue, would be identical with the ball. Rather, the “is” here is the “is” of predication. We can make this a bit clearer by replacing “is” and emphasizing the relationship: The ball has the property of being blue.

The ontology is revealed in your learning that typically the things denoted by subject-terms are “more real” in some important sense than the things denoted by predicate-terms. For example, the ball is thought to be able to remain even if we changed its color. So, if we painted the ball red, it would still be the same ball as before, but now red. If it were your ball, for instance, and someone painted it red, that change wouldn’t upset the fact that it is still your ball. If we destroy the property blue in this case, then, where we “destroy” this instance of being blue by painting the ball red, we don’t destroy the ball itself. But the property of being colored is not like the ball. If we destroyed the ball, whatever properties it possessed would also be destroyed. This shows that there is an asymmetric ontological relationship between the ball and any of its properties. Generally speaking, we can say that the properties of a thing depend for their existence on the existence of the thing in a way that the thing doesn’t depend for its existence on the existence of any of its properties. So, there is a lot to be said about something as simple as the sentence “The ball is blue.”

It would seem, then, that a simple fact isn’t so simple after all. It has constituents. Considering the case under discussion, as just noted in the previous paragraph, the constituents of a simple fact are a thing and some property possessed by that thing. In metaphysical terms, the thing is referred to as a substance and the property is referred to as an attribute (but in addition to attribute, property and quality are also used). This is sometimes referred to as an Aristotelian substance-attribute ontology, since we find it famously worked out by Aristotle himself. This would’ve been the ontology very likely taught to Descartes when he was a student at La Flèche.

Descartes’s ontology is a version of the substance-attribute ontology. He ultimately believed in the existence of one and only one actual substance, which was an infinite being with no beginning or end. Within the context of religion, this being is typically considered to be a god—or in terms of Christianity, as Descartes understood and practiced it, the God (with a capital “G”), where it was said that there was only one (unlike many of the religions of the ancients, three of the major world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—rejected the view that there were many gods).

A substance, a genuine substance, existed on its own, without the help of anything else. No thing other than God meets this condition—or at least this was so according to Descartes. Even so, he noted that we could use the term “substance” to refer to things that weren’t substances strictly speaking. But, as he said in the Principles, we’d have to keep it in mind that we’re now using the term differently than when speaking about a substance proper. (Principles, Part I, Arts. 51, 52; AT VIIIA 24-5: CSM I 210) Descartes posited that there were exactly two kinds of finite substances, which, as just noted, are not substances strictly speaking, since they cannot exist entirely on their own (they require God’s concurrence), but they can be called substances insofar as they can exist independently of one another.

According to Descartes, the two kinds of finite substances that existed are mind and body. Although he recognized several attributes, he said that there were only two principal ones, which were essential to each kind of substance. The principal attribute of mind was thought or thinking. If something thinks, it is a mind; and, if something is a mind, it thinks. The principal attribute of body was extension (in length, breadth, and depth—that is, it was extended in three dimensions). If something is extended, it is a body; and, if something is a body, it is extended. Here, the notion of being solid or impenetrable wasn’t essential to body. “Empty space” was just as much a body in Descartes’s view as was any “solid” thing—both were extended.

Descartes wrote that the principal attribute is how the finite substance is made intelligible to you. So, when conceiving a body, you must be conceiving of something that is extended. Being extended is simply what it is to be a body. If you removed extension from your conception, so to speak, nothing would remain in your idea of body for you to think about. You’d have the idea of nothing at all (or, put differently, you wouldn’t have an idea of anything). The same would go for mind. When conceiving a mind, you must be conceiving of something that thinks. Thinking is simply what it is to be a mind. If you removed thinking from your conception, nothing would remain in your idea of mind for you to think about.

Descartes employed a technical jargon to make clearer the difference between a finite substance and its principal attribute. He said that they are only conceptually distinct. This means they are distinct only in your taking them to be distinct, but that distinction is only in your mind. Technically speaking, we cannot clearly conceive them apart from one another, which amounts to saying that neither can exist independent of the other. “Superman,” for instance, refers to the being who hails from the planet Krypton, but so does “Clark Kent.” Although we might take them to be distinct beings, Superman and Clark Kent are one and the same being, despite the fact that Lois Lane and others take Superman and Clark Kent to be distinct things. Given that “Superman” and “Clark Kent” name one and the same thing, in every world in which we find the thing denoted by “Superman” we’ll find the thing denoted by “Clark Kent.”

Likewise, you won’t find extension, for instance, just floating around in the cosmos minus the finite substance of which it is the principal attribute. You won’t find a naked, attribute-less finite substance just floating around either. Still, you might think you can take them as separate things, as when you say