Roger Ariew argues here that Cartesian philosophy should be regarded as it was in Descartes's own day - as a reaction against, as well as indebted to, Scholastic philosophy. His book illuminates Cartesian philosophy by analyzing debates between Descartes and contemporary Schoolmen and surveying controversies arising in its first reception.

The ongoing renaissance in Descartes studies has been characterized by an attempt to understand the philosopher's texts against his own intellectual background. Roger Ariew here argues that Cartesian philosophy should be regarded as it was in Descartes's own day—as a reaction against, as well as an indebtedness to, scholastic philosophy. His book illuminates Cartesian philosophy by analyzing debates between Descartes and contemporary schoolmen and surveying controversies arising in its first reception. The volume touches upon many topics and themes shared by Cartesian and late scholastic philosophy: matter and form; infinity, place, time, void, and motion; the substance of the heavens; the object or subject of metaphysics; principles of metaphysics (being and ideas) and transcendentals (for example, unity, quantity, principle of individuation, truth and falsity). Part I exhibits the differences and similarities among the doctrines of Descartes and those of Jesuits and other scholastics in seventeenth-century France. The contrasts Descartes drew between his philosophy and that of others are the subject of Part II, which also examines some arguments in which he was involved and details the continued controversy caused by Cartesianism in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Rev. ed. of: Descartes and the last Scholastics. 1999.

Descartes occupies a position of pivotal importance as one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy; he is, perhaps the most widely studied of all philosophers. In this authoritative collection an international team of leading scholars in Cartesian studies present the full range of Descartes' extraordinary philosophical achievement. His life and the development of his thought, as well as the intellectual background to and reception of his work, are treated at length. At the core of the volume are a group of chapters on his metaphysics: the celebrated 'Cogito' argument, the proofs of God's existence, the 'Cartesian circle' and the dualistic theory of the mind and its relation to his theological and scientific views. Other chapters cover the philosophical implications of his work in algebra, his place in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, the structure of his physics, and his work on physiology and psychology.

Before publishing his landmark Meditations in 1641, Rene Descartes sent his manuscript to many leading thinkers to solicit their objections to his arguments. He included these objections, along with his own detailed replies, as part of the first edition. This unusual strategy gave Descartes a chance to address criticisms in advance and to demonstrate his willingness to consider diverse viewpoints—critical in an age when radical ideas could result in condemnation by church and state, or even death. Descartes and his Contemporaries recreates the tumultuous intellectual community of seventeenth-century Europe and provides a detailed, modern analysis of the Meditations in its historical context. The book's chapters examine the arguments and positions of each of the objectors—Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, Morin, Caterus, Bourdin, and others whose views were compiled by Mersenne. They illuminate Descartes' relationships to the scholastics and particularly the Jesuits, to Mersenne's circle with its debates about the natural sciences, to the Epicurean movements of his day, and to the Augustinian tradition. Providing a glimpse of the interactions among leading 17th-century intellectuals as they grappled with major philosophical issues, this book sheds light on how Descartes' thought developed and was articulated in opposition to the ideas of his contemporaries.

Descartes and the First Cartesians adopts the perspective that we should not approach Rene Descartes as a solitary thinker, but as a philosopher who constructs a dialogue with his contemporaries, so as to engage them and elements of his society into his philosophical enterprise. Roger Ariew argues that an important aspect of this engagement concerns the endeavor to establish Cartesian philosophy in the Schools, that is, to replace Aristotle as the authority there. Descartes wrote the Principles of Philosophy as something of a rival to Scholastic textbooks, initially conceiving the project as a comparison of his philosophy and that of the Scholastics. Still, what Descartes produced was inadequate for the task. The topics of Scholastic textbooks ranged more broadly than those of Descartes; they usually had quadripartite arrangements mirroring the structure of the collegiate curriculum, divided as they typically were into logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics. But Descartes produced at best only what could be called a general metaphysics and a partial physics. These deficiencies in the Cartesian program and in its aspiration to replace Scholastic philosophy in the schools caused the Cartesians to rush in to fill the voids. The attempt to publish a Cartesian textbook that would mirror what was taught in the schools began in the 1650s with Jacques Du Roure and culminated in the 1690s with Pierre-Sylvain Regis and Antoine Le Grand. Ariew's original account thus considers the reception of Descartes' work, and establishes the significance of his philosophical enterprise in relation to the textbooks of the first Cartesians and in contrast with late Scholastic textbooks.