QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Descartes employed many Aristotlean concepts in his thinking and in a way simply poured new
wine into old bottles. Descartes wanted to give the spirit what belonged to the spirit and matter
what belonged to matter. He did not accept the principles of form outlined by Aristotle and the
Scholastics which defined the passive and formless matter, any more than he accepted the the
concept of a world soul as defined by the natural philosophers of the Renaissance. For
Descartes, matter was absolutely without soul, and the soul was absolutely immaterial. He
believed that physiology could function by using general mechanical principles without the need
for any souls or vital energy. Plants, animals and the human body were to be regarded as
machines constructed with incomparable skill by an infinite intelligence. However, mechanical
interpretation of the universe had its limits. Human beings were not simply an organised body,
they also had a soul, i.e. thinking substance. Human understanding and will did not belong to the
physical domain, they were states of spiritual reality. It was Descartes’ assumption that the
interaction between the soul and the body took place in the pineal gland. 221
The two realms of reality, the material and the mental, were represented by two fundamental
sciences, mechanics and psychology. The first of these employs concepts of extension and
motion, the second studies thinking i.e. different modifications of consciousness. In his search
for transparent and precise basic concepts, Descartes did not deal with the emotions in the
traditional way employed by moralists or preachers, his position as a natural scientist meant that
in his psychology, he attempted to find a regular coherence of law-observing emotions in the
precise manner that would be employed by a physicist or a physician. Compared with Descartes’
universality, Galileo had confined himself to the investigation of a small number of special
fundamental phenomena, something that Descartes accordingly charged to his account as a
defect. Descartes was also critical of Galilei’s excessive confidence in empirical observation,
believing that he should have deduced the laws controlling falling bodies from clear and
indisputable first principles or primary axioms. In his attempts to find these, Descartes actually
formulated the law of inertia in a clearer manner than Galilei: bodies remain at rest or continue in
their straight motion at a constant velocity, provided that they are not interfered with. In his
interpretations of nature, it is however a fact that Descartes hardly ever conducts a mathematical
argument and is always very vague when expressing functional dependencies. The first
thoroughgoing Cartesian who did full justice to the mathematical treatment was Christian
221 Alanen 1997, 42. Aspelin 1995, 287-189.
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