Although the basis of modern biology is Cartesian, Descartes’s theories of biology have been more often ridiculed than studied. Yet, Dennis Des Chene demonstrates, the themes, arguments, and vocabulary of his mechanistic biology pervade the writings of many seventeenth-century authors. In his illuminating account of Cartesian physiology in its historical context, Des Chene focuses on the philosopher’s innovative reworking of that field, including the nature of life, the problem of generation, and the concepts of health and illness. Des Chene (...) begins by surveying works that Descartes would likely have encountered, from late Aristotelian theories of the soul to medical literature and treatises on machines. The Cartesian theory of vital operations is examined, with particular attention to the generation of animals. Des Chene also considers the role of the machine-model in furnishing a method in physiology, the ambiguities of the notion of machine, and of Descartes’s problem of simulation. Finally, he looks at,the various kinds of unity of the body, both in itself and in its union with the soul. Spirits and Clocks continues Des Chene’s highly regarded exploration -- begun in his previous book, Life’s Form -- of the scholastic and Cartesian sciences as well as the dialogue between these two worldviews. Introduction 1 Part One - Tales of the Bête-Machine [ 1 ] - Self-Movers 13 [ 2 ] - Where Do Machines Come From? 32 [ 3 ] - The Uses of Usus 53 Part Two - Machines, Mechanisms, Bodies, Organs [ 4 ] - Tools of Knowledge 71 [ 5 ] - Jeux D’Artifice 103 [ 6 ] - Unity of the Body 116 Conclusion 153 Bibliography 159 Index 177. (shrink)

In 1738, Jacques Vaucanson unveiled his masterpiece before the court of Louis XV: a gilded copper duck that ate, drank, quacked, flapped its wings, splashed about, and, most astonishing of all, digested its food and excreted the remains. The imitation of life by technology fascinated Vaucanson's contemporaries. Today our technology is more powerful, but our fascination is tempered with apprehension. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, to name just two areas, raise profoundly disturbing ethical issues that undermine our most fundamental beliefs (...) about what it means to be human. In The Vital Machine, David Channell examines the history of our relationship with technology and argues that, while the resolution of these issues may not be imminent, a philosophical framework for dealing with them is already in place. The source of our fears, he suggests, lies in an outmoded distinction between organic life and machines, a distinction rooted in the two world-views that have defined and guided Western civilization: the mechanical and the organic. The mechanical view holds that the universe is basically a machine--we can understand it by breaking it down into its smallest components. Even organisms are machines. The organic view claims that there is something more, some vital, directive force. The whole is more than just the sum of its parts. Even machines are organisms. Channell presents these polar views in a fascinating chronicle of human thought and achievement, ranging over the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, the philosophies of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Marx, the fields of alchemy, physics, astrology, and biology. We see not only how the two views progressed independently, but also how they influenced each other, not only how they persisted, but also how they changed. Most fascinating of all, we follow the emergence of a third, all-embracing world view as developments in genetics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and computer intelligence force both science and philosophy to come to a more complex understanding of the universe. As a central metaphor for this third view Channell proposes "the vital machine." And in this stimulating work by the same name, he reveals how this new metaphor may provide us with the philosophical understanding we need to address the ethical issues our science has created. (shrink)

In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of a sample from a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the Romanian (...) Press to represent the French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s need to gloss over its failure to comply with the Schengen accession requirements and acquire full European Union membership. (shrink)

René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology. Trans., with an Introduction, by Paul J. Olscamp. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965. Pp. xxxvi + 361. = The Library of Liberal Arts, 211. Paper, $2.25. -/- From the notice in Journal of the History of Philosophy 5 (1967), 311: "In the introduction, Professor Olscamp calls attention to the fact that Descartes intended the other three pieces in this volume to serve as examples of the method set forth in (...) the Discourse. I t is only just that Descartes' intentions should now be fulfilled in fairly clear, if occasionally awkward English versions. Seeing these pieces brought together in this way also sheds light on Descartes' philosophical opinions, frequently distorted by over-simplified distinctions like that between empiricist and rationalist. 0lscamp succeeds in showing that Descartes is better thought of as a forerunner to modern-day hypothetico-deductive theories of scientific explanation. Perhaps it is what we should have realized all along in one so preoccupied with methodology. --A. R. Louch". (shrink)

It has become common to find diagrams and flow-charts used in our organizations to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, or to show how parts of the organization interrelate to each other and work together. Such diagrams are used as they are thought to help visualization and simplify things in order to represent the essence of a particular situation, the core features. In this paper, using a social semiotic approach, we show that we need (...) to develop a much more critical sense of how these diagrams and flowcharts can easily abstract, conceal and substitute actual causalities, work roles and relationships. We demonstrate this using the example of a series of interrelated flows-charts used to implement a new system of target-based learning in preschool/kindergartens in Sweden – a system which works highly in favor of a rapidly privatizing education sector. Here, the flow charts shape how school processes and learning are presented to devalue the former system and value the new. (shrink)

The United Nations ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ lays out 17 Sustainable Development Goals to address a range of global issues related to the future of the planet and human well-being. Critics, however, argue that the Agenda, a complex product of multi-stakeholder governance, in its drive to accommodate many competing voices, is overloaded with weakly defined, overlapping and contradictory issues, concepts and buzzwords. These serve to gloss over actual concrete global problems and forces, concealing an underlying (...) free-trade ideology. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we draw attention to the nature of the documents used to communicate the Agenda. These documents comprise an edifice of self-referential texts that rely heavily on infographics, bullet points, charts and tables. Such formats appear to helpfully simplify, distil information and break things down into workable components. But, we show, through the affordances of these formats, the the vagueness of buzzwords, contradictions and lack of clear causalities can be glossed over, presenting the Agenda as a highly technical, engaging, and above all moral process. These formats are important, therefore, for the legitimization and rhetorical power of the Agenda, necessary for its take-up by governments and organizations around the world. (shrink)

Descartes understood the subject matter of physics (or natural philosophy) to encompass the whole of nature, including living things. It therefore comprised not only nonvital phenomena, including those we would now denominate as physical, chemical, minerological, magnetic, and atmospheric; it also extended to the world of plants and animals, including the human animal (with the exception of those aspects of the human mind that Descartes assigned to solely to thinking substance: pure intellect and will). Descartes wrote extensively (...) on physiology and on the physiology and psychology of the senses. This chapter examines the notions of *physiology* and *psychology* in medical and natural philosophical works of Descartes' day; follows his efforts to bring physiology into his mechanistic idiom; considers the relation between physiology of the animal machine and psychological functions that yield functionally appropriate behavior; goes into his physiology and psychology of vision; and elaborates the tension in Descartes' works between his metaphysically supported micro-corpuscularism and his discussion of the animal machine as an organic unity comprising various functionally and teleologically characterized systems. The chapter draws on Descartes' works in both metaphysics and natural philosophy, including his Treatise on Man (originally published as L'Homme, 1664). (shrink)

(1997). Organisms, machines, and societies: From the vertical structure of adaptability to the management of information. World Futures: Vol. 50, No. 1-4, pp. 667-687.

The machine conception of the organism (MCO) is one of the most pervasive notions in modern biology. However, it has not yet received much attention by philosophers of biology. The MCO has its origins in Cartesian natural philosophy, and it is based on the metaphorical redescription of the organism as a machine. In this paper I argue that although organisms and machines resemble each other in some basic respects, they are actually very different kinds of systems. I submit that (...) the most significant difference between organisms and machines is that the former are intrinsically purposive whereas the latter are extrinsically purposive. Using this distinction as a starting point, I discuss a wide range of dissimilarities between organisms and machines that collectively lay bare the inadequacy of the MCO as a general theory of living systems. To account for the MCO’s prevalence in biology, I distinguish between its theoretical, heuristic, and rhetorical functions. I explain why the MCO is valuable when it is employed heuristically but not theoretically, and finally I illustrate the serious problems that arise from the rhetorical appeal to the MCO. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 122-123 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Spirits and Clocks: Machine & Organism in Descartes Dennis Des Chene. Spirits and Clocks: Machine & Organism in Descartes. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 181. Cloth, $39.95. Confronted with the thousandth "entirely new" interpretation of the Cartesian mind-body union, one sometimes wonders whether anything new can (...) in fact be said about the great Descartes. Once again, after his invaluable and prize-winning Physiologia (Cornell University Press, 1996), Des Chene proves that a serious historian, with a keen awareness of historical context, actually can. Unlike the usual accounts of Descartes's animal-machine, Des Chene does not concentrate on the all too familiar set of questions whether or not machines can think, sense, etc. Instead, Des Chene interprets the machine-metaphor the way Descartes meant it to be, viz. as a model for explaining animal and human physiology instead of (cognitive) psychology. Des Chene's central claim is that the Traité de l'Homme and Descartes's later (unpublished) physiological tracts are an attempt to replace scholastic commentaries on Aristotle's De Anima, itself discussed in this book's companion volume Life's Forms (Cornell University Press, 2000). Spirits and Clocks investigates how Descartes's general mechanistic program (outlined in Physiologia) is applied to the field of animal and human life. This project in itself had a far more lasting influence than Descartes's specific and often bizarre physiological explanations. Therefore, Des Chene rightly concentrates on the philosophical aspects of Descartes's general project of "mechanizing" physiology. His short but illuminating book studies a wide range of ontological, epistemological, and even aesthetic aspects of the machine metaphor and, although this is not the express goal [End Page 122] of the book, it also sheds new light on the epistemology and metaphysics of the Meditations. In this sense Spirits and Clocks is not only a significant contribution to the history of biology but first and foremost a must for historians of philosophy.Des Chene explains that the use of a machine model in physiology was neither new nor entirely unacceptable to the Aristotelians. What is new is Descartes's use of it. His mechanistic understanding of the body as a machine is incompatible with accepting the soul as the source of life and the principle of all our physiological and psychological capacities, while Aristotelians had no problem in accepting both the soul and certain machine models of the body. (Aristotle himself uses the lever to explain animal motion.) Des Chene sketches Descartes's attempt to explain all physiological processes by means of the physical properties of material parts that obey the general laws of motion, excluding all talk of ends. In this context, the use of illustrations is of considerable importance: though they cannot per se convey a denial of a "soul-model" of physiology, they strongly suggest that the (mechanistically understood) machine is all there is to say about the functions of human and animal bodies. Des Chene offers an interesting, albeit sometimes somewhat speculative and ahistoric, discussion of the aesthetic aspects of the machine model.As Des Chene showed in his Physiologia, the rejection of teleology is one of the main goals of Descartes's physics. However, although Descartes may be successful in rejecting the view that stones fall down from some kind of desire to reach their final destiny, he is less successful in denying that the eye is meant for seeing (and hence for our self-preservation). Des Chene gives a truly fascinating account of the limits of Descartes's denial of teleology in physiology. This includes questions about the physical unity of the human body: how can I explain why I have this body and how can I even identify this body as a unit without invoking ends? Similarly, Descartes takes the healthy, "normally" functioning body as the norm of his investigations. But, again, can he do so without acknowledging some form of teleology? Descartes's answer in most of these cases is that the final goals... (shrink)

The article develops the conception that Leibniz has of organisms as machines of a particular type, differing from artificial machines because 1. all the parts of an organic machine are in turn composed by smaller machines and thus to infinity; and 2. the maintenance of the individual identity in living machines is provided by the fact that they have folds going to infinity which can unfold and fold back, thus allowing infinite transformations of the body. (...) The author then discusses these two theses. With respect to thesis 1 the question is how the idea that the artificial machines have parts which are not in their turn machines is compatible with the mechanistic worldview hold by Leibniz. With respect to thesis 2 the author emphasizes the fact that Leibniz's conception of the infinite convolution of the organic machines seems to anticipate several points in the mathematics of fractal curves. (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)

Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way (...) toward a natural philosophy of organic life. Explicitly repudiating "vitalism" (the notion that the laws of nature need to be modified when applied to living organisms), Elsasser argues instead that the structural complexity of even a single living cell is "transcomputational"--that is, beyond the power of any imaginable system to compute. Beginning from this insight, Elsasser leads the reader through a step-by-step process that ultimately arrives at the conclusion that living and non-living matter are separated by "a no-man's land of irrationality." Trained in Germany as a physicist, Elsasser first pondered the implications of quantum mechanics for biology as early as 1951. The more closely he studied the inherent complexity of life, the more skeptical he became of the reductionist view of organisms as tiny machines. "An organism," he concluded, "is a source of causal chains which cannot be traced beyond a terminal point because they are lost in the unfathomable complexity of the organism." Like the physicist who works within the bounds of an unfathomable universe, Elsasser argues, the biologist must seek answers within a system that is no less unfathomable. (shrink)

The relation between organisms and machines is very old. Over a century ago, the French historian and philosopher Alfred Victor Espinas observed that from the Greeks onwards the intelligibility of the organic world presupposed a comparison with technical objects. Aristotle, for instance, associated living organs with mechanical artefacts in order to understand animals ‘movements. In the modern period, Descartes, Borelli and other mechanists defended the idea that organisms are, in reality, machines. Today, philosophers and scientists still (...) argue that the genome is like a software and the brain is like a computer. In this article I reconsider the relation between organisms and machines from the perspective of the German geographer and philosopher Ernst Kapp, one of the founding fathers of the Philosophy of Technology. Breaking with a long and venerable philosophical tradition, Kapp argued that machines are, in reality, “organic projections”. Organisms are not machines; they are an imitation or reflection of the organic world. First of all, I clarify the hypothesis of “organic projection”. Secondly, I consider some of the philosophical consequences that such a hypothesis entails over the debate between machinists and anti-mechanists. Finally, and following the previous considerations, I defend the importance of reconnecting the philosophy of technology with philosophy of biology in order to better understand the development of contemporary biology. (shrink)

With Spirits and Clocks, Dennis Des Chene completes a two-part project begun with Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul. In both volumes, Des Chene is concerned with the question of what makes living things living. For the Jesuit Aristotelians, the answer requires a complex analysis of the ontology of soul and power. For Descartes, of course, the answer is completely different; arguably, there is a sense in which his answer is: nothing. Indeed Des Chene does argue this, (...) concluding that for Descartes there are no living things in the Aristotelian sense: the body machine does not live, because it has no powers; the soul does not live because it has no role in nutrition, growth, and generation. Descartes’s physiology thus represents the most radical aspect of his natural philosophy, for he must eliminate souls from living things as part of the general project of eliminating Aristotelian forms from nature. As such, the importance of Descartes’s physiology is manifest; Des Chene’s study is a very welcome and original addition to the still-modest philosophical literature engaged with Descartes’sL’Homme and La description du corps humain. (shrink)

The relation between organisms and machines is very old. Over a century ago, the French historian and philosopher Alfred Victor Espinas observed that from the Greeks onwards the intelligibility of the organic world presupposed a comparison with technical objects. Aristotle, for instance, associated living organs with mechanical artefacts in order to understand animals ‘movements. In the modern period, Descartes, Borelli and other mechanists defended the idea that organisms are, in reality, machines. Today, philosophers and scientists still (...) argue that the genome is like a software and the brain is like a computer. In this article I reconsider the relation between organisms and machines from the perspective of the German geographer and philosopher Ernst Kapp, one of the founding fathers of the Philosophy of Technology. Breaking with a long and venerable philosophical tradition, Kapp argued that machines are, in reality, “organic projections”. Organisms are not machines; they are an imitation or reflection of the organic world. First of all, I clarify the hypothesis of “organic projection”. Secondly, I consider some of the philosophical consequences that such a hypothesis entails over the debate between machinists and anti-mechanists. Finally, and following the previous considerations, I defend the importance of reconnecting the philosophy of technology with philosophy of biology in order to better understand the development of contemporary biology. (shrink)

In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section (...) details Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; they do not have a purpose; they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; they also do not have a purpose; they have a “unity of composition.” The final section argues that their concept of the “body without organs” shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial, natural sciences, and philosophy. The question is, what at this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as (...) info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach humanlevel intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

In philosophical writings from Descartes’ time, the topic of attention attracted notice but not systematic treatment. In Descartes’s own writings, attention was not given the kind of extended analysis that he devoted to the theory of the senses, or the passions, or to the intellect and will. Nonetheless, phenomena of attention arose in relation to these other topics and were discussed in terms of mental operations and, where appropriate, relations to bodily organs. Although not producing a systematic account, (...) Descartes frequently noted attentional phenomena and creatively imagined intricate relations between sensory attention and brain processes. Descartes's observations of attentional phenomena show remarkable breadth, including cases of active mental control of attention and cases in which attention is drawn involuntarily to a novel event (first section). Descartes did not merely observe attentional phenomena; he also offered a framework for understanding them (second section). Part of this framework related attention to the activity of the will. Part also came from his conception of mind-body interaction. He assigned a significant functional role to brain processes in explaining mental phenomena, including aspects of attention. He sometimes moves beyond the usual notions of unidirectional activity or passivity in the process of interaction. Rather, mind and brain are mutually constraining. Mental and physiological processes form a functional unity, in which brain processes contribute to the mental functioning of attention (final section). Furthermore, Descartes was willing to speak of “attention” in the mindless machine portrayed in his Traité de l’homme. That work describes brain states that interact with mind to explain aspects of mental attention. But we must also suppose that these same brain states constitute attention as it occurs in non-human animals, which lack a mind. According to Descartes, although attention is, in the first instance, a mental phenomenon, it can also be ascribed to non-human animals that share brain mechanisms with human beings and the behavior of which can be described as attentively directed toward selected objects in the environment. Translated into French by Olivier Dubouclez. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial (deep learning, robotics), natural sciences (neuroscience, cognitive science, biology), and philosophy (philosophy of computing, philosophy of mind, natural philosophy). The question is, what at (...) this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach human-level intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

Spirits and Clocks is the third in a series of magnificent books in which Dennis Des Chene explores the relationship between late Scholastic philosophy and Cartesian thought. The other two books are Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought and Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul . Together, these three books situate Descartes's thinking in one important aspect of the intellectual context within which it developed. The result is a superbly nuanced study of a thinker (...) whose brilliance has often dazzled his modern commentators so much that they have forgotten he was addressing a philosophical tradition out of which many of his own concepts and arguments derived.In the present book Des Chene considers Descartes's physiological ideas, as presented in Traité de l'homme. He argues that Descartes's “rejection of the vegetative and sensitive souls invented by his predecessors was no less momentous for the science of life than the rejection of forms, powers, and ends was for physics. It was of a piece with his program in physics, executed with the same motives and resting on the same principles” . Spirits and Clocks is a careful, historically informed conceptual analysis of Descartes's notorious doctrine of the bête machine. Considering this idea in context highlights both the traditional and innovative features of Descartes's physiological thought. This book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of early modern natural philosophy by demonstrating both the continuities and discontinuities between the mechanical philosophy and Aristotelian natural philosophy.In the individual chapters Des Chene examines a few detailed examples of physiological questions that he considers particularly significant. These include the explanation of self‐motion, where machines come from, and the role of functional and teleological ideas in Descartes's physiology. Other important topics include sensation and perception, intentionality, and the unity of the body. In examining each of these issues, Des Chene first describes the explanations favored by sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Scholastic philosophers. He then provides a detailed analysis of Descartes's position and shows the precise differences and similarities between Descartes's thought and that of his contemporary Aristotelians. Both aspects of his discussion enrich our historical understanding. Des Chene is one of only a handful of scholars who have given serious attention to late Aristotelian natural philosophy in recent years, and his account in Spirits and Clocks is both informative and useful. Similarly, Traité de l'homme has received less scholarly attention than the Discourse on Method and the Meditations, so the present study is a welcome addition to the literature.Des Chene deploys an impressive array of scholarly skills and knowledge of Descartes's intellectual context as well as analytic precision. The result is an important and original reading of an aspect of Cartesianism that has not received as much attention as Descartes's physics, metaphysics, and epistemology. This book not only illuminates Descartes's theories but also delineates the conceptual commitments of the mechanical philosophy and the details of its differences from the late Scholasticism that it replaced. It serves as an excellent model for a contextualized history of early modern natural philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 294-295 [Access article in PDF] Schouls, Peter A. Descartes and the Possibility of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 171. Cloth, $35.00. There are at least three ways to write the history of philosophy. Truly historical historians of philosophy emphasize the context and development of ideas, concentrating on the intellectual, social, and personal factors that affect the (...) way philosophers have thought about their subject. Analytic philosophers take a critical approach, considering the logic and merit of the arguments of philosophers who have lived in the past almost as if they are engaging in contemporary debates. Another group of philosophers use the ideas of historical figures to support their own philosophical agendas. Peter Schouls' new book on Descartes falls into this third category.Schouls' aim is to present Descartes' philosophy as the origin of modernity. What he means is that "Descartes believed that the world and humanity exist in a relationship which makes it possible for humanity to improve its state through manipulating the world. This manipulation is by means of developing and applying science." Schouls interprets Descartes' notion of progress as leading to "increases in freedom from the drudgery of labor, from the suffering of illness, and from the anxiety of interpersonal and international quarrels,"(ix) arguing that mind-body dualism is necessary for humanity to accomplish these lofty goals.Schouls asks what conditions are needed for humans to develop the science that is a necessary condition for the kinds of progress Descartes sought (and Schouls clearly endorses). Human progress depends on the possibility of science. Descartes founded his science on the pure metaphysics developed in The Meditations. These metaphysical foundations provided the framework for his claim that the human mind can acquire certain knowledge of the world. Central to Descartes' method, Schouls argues, is the view that the imagination must be incorporeal. If this view can be justified, it is a significant departure from the views of most seventeenth-century philosophers who thought that the imagination is a corporeal organ that translates and transmits mechanical impulses to the incorporeal soul. Schouls argues that because the subject-matter of science, especially geometry, involves imagining relationships apart from empirical [End Page 294] experience, it is necessary that the imagination must be incorporeal. Consequently, mind-body dualism is a necessary condition for the kind of science and progress that Descartes sought.There are flaws in this book, some having to do with Schouls' argument and some having to do with its lack of historical context. The two problems are inextricably linked. Schouls reads Descartes without due consideration of historical context. The book's bibliography reveals no primary sources other than the writings of Descartes. Descartes did not write in an intellectual vacuum. He worked within a community of philosophers, and that community provided both the background and audience for his own thoughts. Ignoring this seventeenth-century context causes Schouls to misread the significance of some of Descartes' ideas. For example, he writes that Descartes' philosophy was condemned in both Protestant and Catholic venues "in part because of its assertion of the limitlessness of human freedom" (4). In fact, Descartes' philosophy was banned because he attempted to give a mechanical explanation of the Eucharist. On a related point, Schouls' drive to present Descartes as the origin of modernity causes him to sideline important issues such as the role of theology in Descartes' thought.Similarly, the lack of historical context leads to errors of interpretation. As Alan Gabbey and others have recently demonstrated, terms like "mechanics" and "science" meant something different in the seventeenth century from what they mean today. Even the terms a priori and a posteriori had different meanings in early modern thought. Schouls expresses some mystification about Descartes' use of the term "a priori" in the second Meditiation. This mystification would vanish if he had taken into account early modern usage according to which a priori means reasoning from the one, true cause to an effect rather than acquiring knowledge of the world independently of experience.Schouls' argument sometimes loses... (shrink)

Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, philosophy (...) has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant’s inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also. (shrink)

Important to Kuhn's account of scientific change is the observation that when paradigms are in competition with one another, there is a curious breakdown of rational argument and communication between adherents of competing programs. He attributed this to the fact that competing paradigms are incommensurable. The incommensurability thesis centrally involves the claim that there is a deep conceptual gap between competing paradigms in science. In this paper I argue that in one important case of competing paradigms, the Aristotelian explanation of (...) the properties of bodies in terms of matter and form as opposed to the Cartesian mechanist paradigm, where the properties of bodies are explained on the model of machines, there was no such conceptual gap: the notion of a machine was as fully intelligible on the Aristotelian paradigm as it was on the Cartesian. But this does not mean that the debate between the two sides was conducted on purely rational terms. Rational argument breaks down not because of Kuhnian incommensurability, I argue, but because of other cultural factors separating the two camps. (shrink)

Despite Kant's belief in a universal causal determinism among phenomena and his rejection of any noumenal agency in brutes, he nevertheless rejected Descartes's hypothesis that brutes are machines. Explaining Kant's response to Descartes forms the basis for this discussion of the nature of consciousness and matter in Kant's system. Kant's numerous remarks on animal psychology-as found in his lecture notes and reflections on metaphysics and anthropology-suggest a theory of consciousness and self-consciousness at odds with that traditionally ascribed (...) to him. (shrink)

When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume explores the social representations and significance of technological developments - especially AI and human enhancement - that have started to transform our human agency. It uses these developments to revisit theories of the human mind and its essential characteristics: a first person perspective, concerns and reflexivity. It (...) looks at how the smart machines are used as agents of change in the basic institutions and organisations that hold contemporary societies together: for example in the family and the household, in commercial corporations, in health institutions, or in the military. Its main purpose it to enrich the ongoing public discussion of the social and political implications of the smart machines by looking at the extent to which they further digitalize and bureaucratize the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity. talize and bureaucratize the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity. (shrink)

This rangy and precise book deserves to be read even by those historians who think they are bored with Descartes. While offering surprising and detailed readings of bewildering texts like theDescription of the Human Body, Des Chene constructs a powerful, sad narrative of the Cartesian disenchantment of the body. Along the way he also delivers provocative views on topics as various as teleology, the role of illustrations in the history of mechanism, theories of the sexual differentiation of the foetus, (...) and problems of simulation in scientific method. (shrink)

The free energy principle is sometimes put forward as accounting for biological self-organization and cognition. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it can be described as minimising its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from particles to organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the abiotic to the biotic. Because the FEP is so general in its application, one might wonder whether this framework can capture anything specific (...) to biology. We take steps to correct for this here. We first explicate the worry, taking pebbles as examples of an abiotic system, and then discuss to what extent the FEP can distinguish its dynamics from an organism’s. We articulate the notion of ‘autonomy as precarious operational closure’ from the enactive literature, and investigate how it can be unpacked within the FEP. This enables the FEP to delineate between the abiotic and the biotic; avoiding the pebble worry that keeps it out of touch with the living systems we encounter in the world. (shrink)

I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical rather than ...

The Meditations, one of the key texts of Western philosophy, is the most widely studied of all Descartes' writings. This authoritative translation by John Cottingham, taken from the much acclaimed three-volume Cambridge edition of the Philosophical Writings of Descartes, is based upon the best available texts and presents Descartes' central metaphysical writings in clear, readable modern English. As well as the complete text of the Meditations, the reader will find a thematic abridgement of the Objections and Replies (...) (which were originally published with the Meditations) containing Descartes' replies to his critics. These extracts, specially selected for the present volume, indicate the main philosophical difficulties which occurred to Descartes' contemporaries and show how Descartes developed and clarified his arguments in response. This edition contains a new comprehensive introduction to Descartes' philosophy by John Cottingham and the classic introductory essay on the Meditations by Bernard Williams. (shrink)

The seventeenth–century chemist and philosopher Robert Boyle argued that the world is like a clockwork machine. This led to the problems of the place of a Creator and of how one can explain the directed, “final–cause” nature of organisms. Boyle thought that he could wrap everything up in one neat package, with a clear place for a designing God, but of course the coming of Darwinism casts doubt on this. Nevertheless, Boyle's thinking does have some very interesting implications for the (...) way in which we today should consider the science/religion relationship. (shrink)

IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.

This article, taking a social semiotic approach, analyses two pieces of music written, shared and exalted by two pre-1945 European fascist movements – the German NSDAP and the British Union of Fascists. These movements, both political and cultural, employed mythologies of unity, common identity and purpose in order to elide the realities of social distinction and political–economic inequalities between bourgeois and proletarian groups in capitalist societies. Visually and inter-personally, the fascist cultural project communicated a machine-like certainty about a vision for (...) a new society based on discipline, conformity and the might of the nation. In this article, we are interested in the ways that these very same discourses are also communicated through sound and music in two songs: The Horst Wessel Lied and the BUF marching song, two songs that used the same melody. We analyse the discourses communicated by the semiotic choices made in melody, arrangements, sound qualities, rhythms as well as in lyrics. The article first identifies some of the underlying semiotic resources for meaning making in sound and then shows how these are used in order to communicate specific ideas, values and attitudes. (shrink)

IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.