Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

214 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
77 This feature of language has been highlighted in our own day by Noam Chomsky:
for his account of language as essentially ‘stimulus-free’, see N. Chomsky,
Language and Mind (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
78 Discourse, Part Five, op. cit. For more on the strengths and weaknesses of
Descartes’s language argument, see J.Cottingham, ‘Cartesian Dualism: Theology,
Metaphysics and Science’, in Cambridge Companions: Descartes [6.32].
79 In the Treatise on Man, Descartes compares the nervous system to the complex set
of pipes and reservoirs found in a park with fountains and moving statues:
Visitors who enter the grottos of these fountains…cannot enter without
stepping on certain tiles which are so arranged that if, for example, they
approach a Diana who is bathing they will cause her to
hide in the reeds, and if they move forward to pursue her they will cause a
Neptune to advance and threaten them with his trident.
All these events happen purely mechanically, according to the ‘whim of the
engineers who made the fountains’. But a human being is more than a
physiological system of pipes and levers:
when a rational soul is present in the machine, it will have its principal
seat in the brain and reside there like the fountain keeper who must be
stationed at the tanks to which the fountain’s pipes return if he wants to
produce or prevent or change their movements in some way.
(AT XI 131; CSMI 101)
80 Discourse, Part Five: AT VI 59; CSM I 141.
81 cf. Synopsis to Meditations: ‘…l’esprit OH l’âme de l’homme (ce que je ne
distingue point)…’ (AT IX 11; CSM II 10).
82 Discourse, Part Four: AT VI 32f.; CSM I 127.
83 cf. AT VII 8; CSM II 7.
84 Meditation Two: AT VII 30–1; CSM II 20–1.
85 AT VII 78; CSM II 54. The gloss in square brackets does not appear in the original
Latin text of 1641, but is inserted in the later French translation. See above, note 50.
86 Sixth Meditation, op. cit.
87 See AT VII 49; CSM II 33: ‘I do not take it upon myself to try to use the power of
human reason to settle any of those matters which depend on the free will of God.’
88 Compare Leibniz’s critique of the ontological argument: Discourse on
Metaphysics, §23. See further J.Cottingham, The Rationalists [6.12], 100.
89 See further T.Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence (London, Routledge,
1968).
90 This line of thought was the basis of the ‘Averroist heresy’ (condemned by the
Lateran council in 1513) which denied personal immortality. See further AT VII 3;
CSM II 4; and Cottingham, cited in note 78.
91 Sixth Meditation: AT VII 81; CSM II 56.