Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science

This volume collects some of the seminal essays on Descartes by Daniel Garber, one of the pre-eminent scholars of early-modern philosophy. A central theme unifying the volume is the interconnection between Descartes’ philosophical and scientific interests, and the extent to which these two sides of the Cartesian program illuminate each other, a question rarely treated in the existing literature. Amongst the specific topics discussed in the essays are Descartes’ celebrated method, his demand for certainty in the sciences, his account of the relation of mind and body, and his conception of God’s activity on the physical world. This collection will be a mandatory purchase for any serious student of or professional working in seventeenth-century philosophy, history of science, or history of ideas.

• Garber is internationally renowned historian of seventeenth-century philosophy • Co-editor of The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy • Descartes is a central philosopher and we do well with everything we publish on Descartes

Introduction; Part I. Historiographical Preliminaries: 1. Does history have a future? Some reflections on Bennett and doing philosophy historically; Part II. Method, Order and Certainty: 2. Descartes and method in 1637; 3. A point of order: analysis, synthesis, and Descartes’s Principles; 4. J. B. Morin and the Second Objections; 5. Descartes and experiment in the Discourse and Essays; 6. Descartes on knowledge and certainty; Part III. Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature: 7. Mind, body, and the laws of nature in Descartes and Leibniz; 8. Understanding interaction: what Descartes should have told Elizabeth; 9. How God causes motion: Descartes, divine sustenance, and occasionalism; 10. Descartes and occasionalism; 11. Semel in Vita: the scientific background to Descartes meditations; 12. Forms and qualities in the Sixth Replies; Part IV. Larger Visions: 13. Descartes, or the cultivation of the intellect; 14. Experiment, community, and the constitution of nature in the seventeenth century.

\'This valuable collection of seminal papers, some heretofore not easily accessible, no doubt will enrich a wide audience especially students of and professionals engaged in early modern history of philosophy, ideas, or science. It enticingly shows the development of thought over time of one of the world\'s leading scholars of Descartes\' system of philosophy.\' – The European Legacy

‘One of the merits of these essays is that they engage with the full scope of Descartes’s texts, and are sensitive to variations between Latin and French versions of the originals.’ – British Journal for the History of Philosophy