Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: A year before his death in 2010, Paul Hoffman published this collection of fourteen essays on René Descartes, two of which appear here for the first time. This book serves as a testament both to Hoffman's philosophical acumen and to his contribution to the history of early modern philosophy over the past twenty-five years: three of the essays featured in the volume — ‘The Unity of Descartes's Man’ (pp. 15–32), ‘Cartesian Passions and Cartesian Dualism’ (pp. 105–24), and ‘Three Dualist Theories of the Passions’ (pp. 179–95) — have captivated Anglo-American scholarship since their publication. Beyond his trademark close textual exegesis, the defining feature of Hoffman's work on Descartes is his insistence that Descartes remains committed to a number of Aristotelian doctrines. Though this was a novel claim in English twenty-five years ago, that no one would disagree with this assessment today is due, in part, to Hoffman's work. Thus, the evaluative question of greatest interest is not whether Descartes was an Aristotelian, but whether he was an Aristotelian in the three specific ways Hoffman claims, which are: (1) Descartes adopts a version of Aristotelian hylomorphism to explain the ontology of the human being, which for him is a third substance on a par with mind and body; (2) Descartes accepts an Aristotelian and distinctly un-Humean view of causation where the ‘action’ (actio) in the agent-cause and the ‘passion’ (passio) in the recipient effected are numerically identical; and (3) Descartes commits himself to an Aristotelian ‘incorporation thesis’, whereby the thing perceived by the mind with objective existence is the same thing existing in the world (pp. 3–4).
Source: Mind
DOI: 10.1093/mind/fzr037
Authors: G. Manning, M. Stan
Institution: California Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1980198696