Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

CHAPTER 6
Descartes: metaphysics and the philosophy of
mind
John Cottingham
THE CARTESIAN PROJECT
Descartes is rightly regarded as one of the inaugurators of the modern age, and
there is no doubt that his thought profoundly altered the course of Western
philosophy. In no area has this influence been more pervasive than in
metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. But Descartes himself would perhaps
have been surprised to learn that these aspects of his work were to be singled out
by subsequent generations for special attention. For his own conception of
philosophy, and of the philosophical enterprise he was engaged on, was
enormously wide ranging; so far from being confined to ‘philosophy’ in the
modern academic sense of that term, it had to do principally with what we should
now call ‘science’. Descartes attempted, in his writings on cosmology,
astronomy and physics, to develop a general theory of the origins and structure
of the universe and the nature of matter, and he also did a considerable amount
of detailed work in more specialized areas such as optics, meteorology,
physiology, anatomy and medicine. In all these fields, Descartes aimed for
explanatory economy; his goal was to derive all his results from a small number
of principles of great simplicity and clarity, and he took mathematics as a model
for the precise and unified structure of knowledge which he was seeking.
Descartes’s ambition, however, was not just to produce a clear, precise and
unified system of scientific explanations. He insisted that nothing could count as
genuine scientia, as true knowledge, if it contained any hidden assumptions or
presuppositions which had not been thoroughly scrutinized. As a schoolboy, he
received a thorough training in philosophy and theology from the Jesuits at the
College of La Flèche, but he later observed wryly that although the school had
the reputation of being ‘one of the best in Europe’ he found that the philosophy
he was taught, ‘despite being cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent
minds’, contained not a single point that was not ‘disputed and hence doubtful’. 1
Although Descartes clearly believed that the scientific work he pursued as a
young man was free from this son of uncertainty, 2 there remained the possibility
that some unexamined premise—some ‘preconceived opinion’ 3 —was infecting