User:Goclenius/Descartes' Life from 1630 to 1639

This article is part of the René Descartes series.

This article is part of the Descartes’ Life series.

The Descartes’ Life series presents information about Descartes’ life and his historical context. For systematic discussion of his philosophical doctrines, see René Descartes.

Articles in this series:
 * Descartes’ Life from 1596 to 1629
 * Descartes’ Life from 1630 to 1639
 * Descartes’ Life from 1639 to 1650

Natural philosophy and the Discourse (1630–1639)
Descartes, who had been living the rural life at Petit-Marais, left France for the Netherlands at the end of 1628. In July 1629, having had not long before registered as a student at Franeker in Friesland, he mentions a little treatise on metaphysics, which was supposed to have contained proof of the existence of God and the separability of the human soul from the body. To Mersenne he writes that he has a proof on the basis of which he knows that God exists “with more certainty than I know the truth of any proposition of Geometry” (AT 1:182; the claim is repeated in the Conversation with Burman, AT 5:178). It is likely that the proof was a version of the ontological proof later published in Meditations 5 and the first book of the Principles (Gaukroger 1995:198).

In the same letters to Mersenne that mention the little treatise, Descartes puts forward a doctrine now commonly known as “the creation of the eternal truths”. Descartes holds that the creating act of God is absolutely free, and in particular undetermined by any antecedent understanding of essences or the good. Acccording to some interpreters, the doctrine is alluded to in Meditations 5, where Descartes attributes to the ideas of mathematics, as to the idea of God, a nature independent of our manner of thinking of them.

Natural philosophy
In 1630–1633, Descartes devoted himself to mathematics and natural philosophy. In June 1630 Descartes registered as a student at the University of Leiden, where it is likely he saw human dissections at the celebrated anatomical theatre. Late in 1631, Jacobus Golius, professor of mathematics and Arabic at Leiden, sent to various mathematicians a problem posed by the ancient geometer Pappus, who remarked that the general version of the problem could not be solved. By introducing what we would call affine coordinates, and drawing on his expertise in the algebra of Vieta and Faulhaber, Descartes reduces the problem to an algebraic problem. His method, published later in the Geometry, made possible the solution of a host of problems hitherto resistant to the purely geometrical methods of the ancients.

In the latter half of 1629, Descartes, starting from a question about parhelia (sun dogs), undertook to explain a host of meteorological phenomena; by the end of the year he had decided to explain “the whole of physics” (To Mersenne 13 Nov 1629, AT 1:70). The result was a corpuscularian physics, based on three laws of motion, the first of which was the law of inertia put forward earlier by Beeckman. In The World (also known as the Treatise on light), which was published only after Descartes' death, Descartes carries out his program, conceiving of matter only as extension, appealing only to efficient causes, and deriving—in principal—all natural phenomena from the laws of motion and hypotheses about the shapes and motions of particles.

During these years Descartes not only witnessed dissections but performed them himself, on carcasses acquired from local butchers; he also performed experiments on live animals. The Treatise on man, drawing on Descartes’ own observations but also on ancient and Renaissance sources, attempts to do for physiology what The World had done for cosmology and meteorology. Describing the body as a machine or automaton, it explains mechanistically the phenomena that in Aristotelian psychology had been ascribed to the inferior parts of the soul: the vegetative part, which included the powers of generation (reproduction), growth, and nutrition; and the sensitive part, which included the five outer senses, memory, imagination, appetite, and the power of locomotion. Accepting Harvey’s recently published theory of the circulation of the blood, he disagrees with Harvey on the cause of the pulse, and attempted to find a mechanistic explanation for what Harvey had attributed to a power or vis of the heart muscle.

The Discourse and the Essays
In 1633, Descartes, having learned of the condemnation of Galileo, and knowing that to publish the Copernican cosmology of The World would now violate the expressed view of the Holy Office, put his work on natural philosophy aside. For the rest of his life he refused to publish it. Instead, in 1635–1636 he reworked material on optics, geometry, and meteorological phenomena into three Essays. To accompany the Essays, Descartes wrote the Discourse on method, which in addition to a truncated version of the rules devised in the 1620s included an intellectual autobiography, a “provisional morality”, a sketch of his physiology and physics (omitting his Copernican views), and a request that his researches be funded by the state. Written in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the Discourse was intended to be accessible to honnêtes hommes of all sorts, not only to the learned, and even to women, who were not taught Latin as a matter of course.

Most notably, the Discourse included in its fourth part the arguments for the existence of God, the distinction of mind and body, and the resolution of doubt that would be presented more fully in the Meditations. In letters to Mersenne, Descartes says that he did not present the entire argument for fear that his less well-prepared readers might be led astray (To Mersenne, March 1637, AT 1:350). It is in the Discourse—or rather in a Latin translation of it made in the 1640s—and not in the Meditations that the phrase cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) appears. The Discourse also includes, in its presentation of the body-machine, a criterion by which to discern those machines that have souls joined with them from those that don’t: if the creature before us can respond appropriately in a wide variety of situations, and if in particular it can respond to language, then it is not only a machine but a machine that has the power of reason, and therefore a soul like ours. Turing’s test may be regarded as an updated version of Descartes’. Like Turing’s, Descartes’ test does not of itself prove that the mind is distinct from the body; that a thing which has the power of reason cannot be a body is a separate question.

Hélène and Francine
In 1635 a daughter, Francine, was born to Descartes and Hélène, a serving maid at the house where he was staying in late 1634. Descartes acknowledged paternity, but the relationship was kept secret even from close friends like Constantijn Huygens. In a letter of 1637 to an unknown addressee, Descartes asks that his “niece” and Hélène should arrive as soon as possible. This is the only reference to either of them in Descartes’ correspondence; other letters, including letters to Hélène, for whose existence there is evidence were probably destroyed shortly after Descartes’ death. Baillet says that he planned to send his daughter to France for her education. But in September 1640 Francine died. Baillet reports Descartes as saying that this was “the greatest sorrow he had ever experienced in his life”.

Responses to the Discourse and the Essays
In the period from 1637 to early 1640 Descartes, through the intermediary of Mersenne, engaged in scientific controversy with Hobbes and Fermat. He also corresponded with critics of the Discourse. Letters to Libertus Fromondus and to Vopiscus Plempius discuss the mechanistic explanation of the operations of animals and the circulation of the blood: concerning the latter, Descartes adduces in vivo experiments that he is likely to have performed himself. Among his more persistent critics in this period was Jean-Baptiste Morin, author of a book on the existence of God and later of works on astrology. Morin, arguing from an Aristotelian point of view, takes issue with Descartes’ theory of light, with his corpuscularian physics, and with his method. In letters to a more sympathetic correspondent, Pierre Petit, an engineer and astronomer, Descartes defends his claim that animals are machines, a claim that continued to spark controversy between Cartesians and their opponents well into the eighteenth century.

Next in series:
 * Descartes’ Life from 1639 to 1650

Works of Descartes
Collected editions

Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny, eds. and trans. The philosophical writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991.

Single works

Descartes, René. Specimina philosophiæ, seu dissertatio de methodo Rectè regendæ rationis, &amp; veritatis in scientiis investigande: Dioptrice et Metora [A specimen of philosophy, or Dissertation on the method of rightly conducting reason and of investigating the truth in the sciences; Optics; Meteors]. Translated (into Latin) by Étienne de Courcelle. Amsterdam: Ludovicus Elzevirius, 1644. (Facsimile reprint with a preface (in Italian) by J.-R. Armogathe and G. Belgioioso: Lecce: Conte Editore, 1998.)

Biographies
English translation:

(Eng. trans. Jane Marie Todd,

Other works
Ariew, Roger. (1999) Descartes and the last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ariew, Roger, John Cottingham, and Tom Sorell, eds. (1998) Background to Descartes’ Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beeckman, Isaac. (1604–1634) Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634. Ed. Cornelis de Waard. The Hague, 1939–1955. 4v.

Billing, Christian. (2004) “Modelling the anatomy theatre and the indoor hall theatre: Dissection on the stages of early modern London”. Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 13 (April 2004): 3.1-17. Last viewed 21 April 2006.

Bos, Henk. (2001) ''Redefining geometrical exactness. Descartes’ transformation of the early modern concept of construction''. Heidelberg: Springer.

Mancosu, Paolo. (1996) Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Méchoulan, Henri, ed. Problématique et réception du Discours de la méthode et des Essais. Paris: Vrin, 1988.

2 vols. (Series: À la recherche de la vérité)