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  • Descartes and the First Cartesians by Roger Ariew
  • John Grey
Roger Ariew. Descartes and the First Cartesians. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xix + 236. Cloth, $74.00.

The title of Roger Ariew’s new book parallels that of his earlier collection of essays, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, published in 1999 and widely regarded as a signal contribution to the study of Descartes’s relationship to his intellectual predecessors. Some of the themes of that work are reflected in the new book as well. In both, Ariew seeks to overthrow the myth of Descartes as staunch opponent of Scholasticism by revealing his affinities to strands of Scholastic thought. Indeed, given the title, it may be surprising that much of Descartes and the First Cartesians focuses on Descartes’s relationship to Scholastic philosophy. The reason is that Ariew’s aim is to show how Descartes’s followers designed textbooks for his system, supplanting a traditional Scholastic curriculum and spreading Cartesianism in its stead.

To make sense of this evolution, Ariew provides a fascinating account of how Scholastic textbooks were typically structured. Thus, after a useful first chapter delineating the key philosophical, theological, and political factions at play in the educational institutions that Descartes and his followers hoped to influence, the second and longest chapter of the book is titled “Summa Philosophiae Quadriparta or the Construction of the Late Scholastic Textbook.” As the title suggests, a philosophy textbook in the period was expected to include four parts: logic, physics, metaphysics, and ethics. The chapter digs into the details of how a variety of Scholastic textbooks presented these four topics, and Ariew persuasively argues that the patterns found here reflect important developments in late Scholasticism. For example, they reveal the slow rate at which scientific results were taken up by the academic community (87–92), and the transition toward a modern conception of form as structure (78–79).

In chapter 3, Ariew provides an overview of (some of) Descartes’s views insofar as they fall under the four traditional textbook categories, emphasizing points of continuity with Scholastic views. Since Ariew aims to set the stage for the Cartesians, this chapter provides a fairly orthodox portrayal of Descartes. Finally, the fourth chapter leverages the examination of late Scholastic textbooks to highlight how different Cartesians came up with their own ways of systematically presenting (and sometimes modifying) Cartesian philosophy in the style of a textbook. Ariew considers an extremely wide range of Cartesians, from the more familiar (Pierre Sylvain Régis, the young Baruch Spinoza) to those less frequently investigated (François Bayle, Jacques Rohault, Jacques du Roure).

Anyone familiar with even a portion of Ariew’s decades of work in the history of philosophy will know to expect top-notch historical scholarship. Descartes and the First Cartesians does not disappoint. Ariew provides extensive references to primary texts when they bear even a whiff of relevance to a topic, and the author’s deep knowledge of the period is on full display throughout. That said, the author’s engagement with contemporary debates is often cursory, sometimes making it difficult to understand the extent of his contribution to the literature. To take one example, consider the introduction to a nice discussion of Descartes’s concept of moral certainty: “There has been a fair bit of commentary about moral certainty, but I think Descartes’ concept is still not fully understood. . . . [A]gainst most commentators . . . moral certainty should not be equated with high probability” (143–44); no contemporary authors are cited. Since Ariew provides no specific reference to the commentary at issue, it is hard to be sure precisely whom he has in mind, and therefore difficult to evaluate the debate. When Ariew engages more carefully with the secondary literature on a point of contention, however, his arguments are informative and persuasive. His argument that Descartes is not properly understood as promoting the “mathematization” of nature—contra an influential line of interpretation tracing back to Alexander Koyré—is exemplary in this regard. He disarms the opposing interpretation by illuminating the developmental history of Descartes’s views. This in turn supports his alternative view that the appearance of the mathematization of nature is produced...

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