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In addition to the information that Favareau gives on Descartes (1596–1650), the latter’s decision to move against other scholars writing on cognition in his era, and to start philosophical discussion on an entirely new set of methodological principles in which methodological solipsism could serve as the foundation for the construction of a veridical, empirical science (Favareau p.23) was strongly related to issues of semiosis. During most of Descartes lifetime Europe was undergoing a 30 Year War, Europe’s worst war until the 20th century, which resulted in extensive destruction of entire regions, denuded by the foraging armies with episodes of famine and disease significantly decreasing the populace of the German states, Bohemia, the Low Countries and Italy, while bankrupting most of the combatant powers. The initial controversy starting the war was a fulmination over signs and their representation, which Catholics termed the Protestant ‘apostasy.’ While the Protestant apostasy was not the sole reason for the war, it gave a continuous impetus to the warfare. Catholic liturgy maintained faith in transubstantiation, maintaining that while all that is accessible to the senses remains as before, the wheat bread and grape wine offered communicants in the sacrament of the mass transformed into the substance of the Body and Blood of Jesus. In the Protestant ritual, the wafer and wine offering to communicants was recognized as metaphor for body and blood of Christ. As signs standing for the body and blood of Christ, the Protestants declared that these signs had sufficient ‘hold’ on communion participants to ‘determine’ Protestants as members of Christian community. Catholics would not accept this. Descartes and his intellectual compatriots obviously had enough with a situation in which competing significations encouraged war dementia.
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Harries-Jones, P. Essential Reading. Biosemiotics 4, 401–409 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-011-9129-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-011-9129-x