Journal of the History of Philosophy

In the past two decades, Descartes's last work, The Passions of the Soul, has received considerable attention from Descartes scholars. In the first English-language monograph on the Passions, Deborah Brown mounts a case for the work's philosophical significance. Brown takes Descartes's treatment of the passions to extend the discussion of the mind-body union initiated in the Sixth Meditation, and in her book seeks "to show that it is the passions more than any other modes of mind that are fundamental to our experience of unity, and to show why that experience is necessary to our practical and theoretical enterprises, insofar as these depend on the co-operation of the body" (7). Brown also claims that "the value of the 'little treatise' [the Passions] extends beyond the narrow topic of the passions and bears upon a proper understanding of Descartes's whole thought" (10). [End Page 499]

In the first two chapters of the book, Brown puts the Passions in historical context and thereby establishes her book's interpretive framework. In chapter one, she locates the Passions in relation to Descartes's writings. She naturally begins by considering Descartes's correspondence with Princess Elizabeth, since his sustained reflection on the passions began in this correspondence. Brown suggests that the Passions may be seen as a kind of response to Elizabeth's famous questions about Cartesian dualism, and claims that "the search for congruence between reason and passion"—a recurring theme of the correspondence with Elizabeth—"is the overarching theme of the Passions, and the one that unifies it" (13). She concludes the chapter by advancing the interesting interpretive hypothesis that the Passions "complements the Meditations and extends its project into the practical realm" (27). In chapter two, Brown succinctly and usefully locates the Passions in the context of related work by Descartes's predecessors and contemporaries, examining a range of texts from both the medical and philosophical traditions. According to Brown, Descartes's approach to the passions is distinctive because it reflects the "unitary" conceptions of mind and body that Descartes derives from his metaphysics.

The remainder of the book divides into two parts: chapters 3–5 treat theoretical issues about the passions, while chapters 6–8 treat practical issues. In chapters 3–5, Brown examines, in turn, the function of the passions in promoting the survival of the embodied mind, their intentionality and ontological status, advancing distinctive positions on all these topics. The discussion of the function of the passions in chapter three is the most interesting and novel interpretive contribution of this part of the book. Brown argues that the passions are functionally related to, although distinct from, sensations: her suggestion seems to be that sensations give the embodied mind information, and passions somehow respond to that information in order to motivate action. While Brown is absolutely right to emphasize the motivational function of the passions, her interpretation of their function is somewhat underdeveloped, and could be strengthened with more attention to the relation between sensations and the passions, on the one hand, and the passions and the will, on the other. In chapters 6–8, Brown considers themes in Descartes's Passions and related writings that have received relatively little scholarly attention: the role of the passions of wonder and love in promoting and sustaining the search for knowledge, including self-knowledge, the relation between the passions and self-mastery, and the place of the passions in the virtuous life. Although Brown's discussion in these chapters is very imaginative—her comparison between Descartes's and Machiavelli's conceptions of virtue in chapter eight is particularly intriguing—she does not make an especially convincing case for the depth or significance of Descartes's thinking about issues in moral psychology, which is somewhat piecemeal.

Brown's book is historically and philosophically rich and provocative. Her discussion in chapters 3–5 deftly illustrates the way in which attention to the Passions helps to shed a new light on long-standing questions in the interpretation of...