Descartes’ Treatise on Man and its Reception

Résumé

This edited volume features 20 essays written by leading scholars that provide a detailed examination of L’Homme by René Descartes. It explores the way in which this work developed themes not just on questions such as the circulation of the blood, but also on central questions of perception and our knowledge of the world.

Coverage first offers a critical discussion on the different versions of L’Homme, including the Latin, French, and English translations and the 1664 editions. Next, the authors examine the early reception of the work, from the connection of L’Homme to early-modern Dutch Cartesianism to Nicolas Steno’s criticism of the work and how Descartes’ clock analogy is used to defend two different conceptions of the articulation between anatomical observations and functional hypotheses.

The book then goes on to explore L’Homme and early-modern anthropology as well as the how the work has been understood and incorporated into the works of scientists, physicians, and philosophers over the last 150 years.

Overall, readers will discover how the trend over the last few decades to understand human cognition in neuro-physiological terms can be seen to be not something unprecedented, but rather a revival of a way of dealing with these fundamental questions that was pioneered by Descartes.

Table des matières/Contents

1 The Story of L’Homme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Delphine Antoine-Mahut

Part I Editions and Translations of L’Homme

2 The Primacy of L’Homme in the 1664 Parisian
Edition by Clerselier. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Annie Bitbol-Hespériès

3 New Indications for Critical Edition of L’Homme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Franco A. Meschini

4 L’Homme in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Stephen Gaukroger

Part II The Early Reception of L’Homme

5 The Early Dutch Reception of L’Homme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Tad M. Schmaltz

6 The Critical Reception of Cartesian Physiology
in Tommaso Cornelio’s Progymnasmata Physica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Raffaele Carbone

7 The Reception of L’Homme Among the Leuven Physicians :
The Condemnation of 1662 and the Origins of Occasionalism. . . . . . 103 Domenico Collacciani

8 Machine and Communication of Corporeal Dispositions
in Descartes and La Forge : The Mysterious ‘Article 83’
of L’Homme and La Forge’s Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Philippe Drieux

9 La Forge on Memory : From the Treatise on Man
to the Treatise on the Human Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Emanuela Scribano

10 Light and Man : An Anomaly in the Treatise on Light ? . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Gabriel Alban-Zapata

11 Anatomy, Mechanism and Anthropology :
Nicolas Steno’s Reading of L’Homme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Raphaële Andrault

12 The Art of Cartesianism : The Illustrations of Clerselier’s
Edition of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (1664) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Steven Nadler

Part III L’Homme and Early-Modern Anthropology

13 A Treatise of Human Nature, a Treatise of the World ? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Claude Gautier

14 What the Body Can Do : A Comparative Reading of Descartes’
Treatise on Man and Spinoza’s Physical Interlude . . . . . . . . . . . ... . 237 Julie Henry

15 Hobbes and Descartes on Anthropology :
Is There a Debt of Hobbesian Anthropology to L’Homme ? . . . . ... . 247 Arnaud Milanese

16 Enlightenment Criticisms of Descartes’ Anthropology . . . . . . . . ... . 261 Stephen Gaukroger

Part IV L’Homme Today

17 L’Homme in Psychology and Neuroscience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . 269

Gary Hatfield

18 The Embodied Descartes : Contemporary
Readings of L’Homme. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . 287 Barnaby R. Hutchins, Christoffer Basse Eriksen,
and Charles T. Wolfe

Les auteurs

Delphine Antoine-Mahut
CNRS, ENS de Lyon, IHRIM-UMR 5317

Stephen Gaukroger
Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science