Abstract

The means of exposition and the content of Descartes’ Traité de l’homme and Spinoza’s Physical Interlude are quite dissimilar. One is a long treatise meticulously exploring a number of functions of a machine exactly resembling to vital and sensitive functions of a human body. The other looks like a short digression about physical aptitudes of bodies which aren’t specifically mentioned as living bodies. These two texts have yet an approach in common: proposing a physical explanation of body’s functions, taking notice of what a body can by itself, independently of any animation or deliberate set in motion. I propose in this paper to explain the dissimilarity between these two texts by their taking root in different philosophical plans. Spinoza’s Physical Interlude takes place in a book which has ethical aims; it induces Spinoza to regard physical aptitudes of human bodies as conditions of the possibility of an ethics progression.