Recent re-evaluation of the question of the exact role of experience in the Cartesian philosophy has emerged from many quarters. The metaphysical issue of innate ideas has been raised by such scholars as McRae and Miles, and a close examination of the role of empirical enquiry and methodology in Cartesian science have been undertaken by Clarke, Garber, Buchdahl and Laudan, to mention only a few. These recent reappraisals of the role of experience in Descartes's philosophy have been cast mostly in (...) twentieth-century terms with a specific view to concerns of the present. ;My research centres on an examination of the philosophical works of three Cartesians, Antoine Le Grand, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis. Though they are relatively minor figures in the history of ideas, their defence of Descartes's thesis concerning the free creation of the eternal truths, and their emphasis on the importance of experience, provide a unique opportunity to reevaluate the role of experience in the Cartesian philosophy in terms that are common in the period. ;There was a strongly empirical component in the philosophical doctrines and practices of these seventeenth-century Cartesians. Le Grand's view of truth as created and dependent on the will of God led him to assign experiment and experience the role of "making manifest" the operation of laws in the physical universe. Desgabets rejected innate ideas, and argued that all ideas depend on the operation of the senses. Regis emphasized the immutability and total dependence of truths and essences on the free will of God, and thereby undermined the rationalist foundation for the Cartesian doctrine of essences. ;My goal in this approach to the question of the nature and role of experience in the Cartesian philosophy is to explore the philosophical basis of the empiricist tendencies found in Descartes as developed by three of his disciples. My hope is that my study of Le Grand, Regis, and Desgabets, who are relatively unknown today, will not only serve to place them appropriately within the history of ideas, but will dislodge the common misconception of Cartesianism as having been an inherently rationalist philosophy. (shrink)

There is a great deal in Man Machine and Other Writings that will delight the reader. Thomson has managed to capture much of La Mettrie’s wit and poetic use of language, which is no easy task; as La Mettrie himself comments on his “figurative style,” it “is often necessary in order to express better what is felt and to add grace to truth itself”. The central thesis of Man Machine needs little introduction. Inspired by the suggestion in Part 5 of (...) Descartes’s Discourse on Method that animals are machines, La Mettrie extends the metaphor to man. Man is like a watch whose springs and wheels, properly organized, move to perform its function. But before the reader concludes that La Mettrie is embracing Descartes’s reduction of biological phenomena to “lifeless” mechanism, La Mettrie further claims that matter itself cannot tell time. Only a body appropriately organized can have the property of self-motion, and, hence, perform such functions as telling time, or feeling, or thinking. La Mettrie’s primary task is to vitalize Cartesian mechanism to show that self-directed motion could be a property of organized matter: “I believe thought to be so little incompatible with organized matter that it seems to be one of its properties, like electricity, motive power, impenetrability, extension, etc.”. As for how inert, simple matter becomes active and composed of organs, and, in some cases, endowed with feeling and thought, La Mettrie appeals to our ignorance of causes which prevents us from knowing ultimate beginnings or ends. Such ignorance, however, does not prevent us from admitting such “incontrovertible observations” as that organized matter possesses a motive principle, whereas unorganized matter does not. Other themes in the work include his account of the faculty of imagination as the origin of thought, observations in comparative psychology, a sketch of thinking as a symbolic process, and a discussion of whether apes could speak. Man Machine, as Thomson explains in the introduction, is not a formal treatise, but, rather, a loosely structured polemic, often given to rhetorical flourishes. However, where Man Machine falls short on argumentation it will surely provoke and engage the reader. (shrink)