Detlefsen, Karen

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Roger Ariew, Dennis Des Chene, Douglas M. Jesseph, Tad M. Schmaltz, andTheo Verbeek. Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. 2nd ed.Lanham,MD:Rowman&Littlefield, 2015. Pp. 408. $115.00 (cloth); $109.99 (ebook).In the midst of the usual philosophical reading that professional philosophersengage in—monographs with a relatively tight organizing theme, and articles—reading a historical dictionary is an unusual, and often very interesting andsatisfying, experience. This is certainly true of this volume, a historical dictio-nary on Descartes and the general philosophy he spawned. The five authorshave all written extensively on the philosophy of Descartes, the individuals andcontext that shaped him, and his impact in early modern Europe. So they arewell poised to produce a relatively comprehensive set of entries detailing Des-cartes’s philosophy and “those who supported him, who corrected him, andwho together formed one of the major movements in philosophy: Cartesian-ism” (xi; Jon Woronoff, series editor). I take it that this text has at least twoaudiences and serves a different primary purpose for each audience: the relativenovices can use it for introductions to specific topics that might be of interestfor further research and exploration, and the philosopher more knowledgeableabout Descartes can use it to expand and deepen her knowledge with a widerange of fascinating details about Descartes and his philosophy. For the mostpart, the authors do an admirable job of the tasks at hand. There are hundredsof entries covering figures (some well known and others not), topics Descarteswrote about, social and religious movements, and scientific and mathematicalmovements. It’s inevitable that with a project of this scope, authors will have tomake choices about what to include, and as a result, there are some omissions.These omissions aside, this volume succeeds.The book opens with a rich and thorough introduction before turning tothe alphabetical entries themselves, and then it closes with close to 50 pages ofbibliographical information. The introduction provides a solid and interestingaccount of Descartes’s “life and times” and then gives an overview of Descartes’sphilosophy and the Cartesianism that grew out of an engagement with andreaction to that philosophy. The entries, each one usually written by one of thefive authors, fall into a broad swath of categories: philosophical terms from meta-physics, epistemology, musical theory, passions and morals, natural philosophy,mathematics, and more; people names; place names; theological and culturalmovements and peoples (e.g., Jansenism, Jesuits, Pelagianism); and titles of texts.Within each entry, terms that are cross-referenced to other entries are foundin boldface. Finally, the 50 pages of bibliographical material include over 700Book Reviews | FA L L 2016345sources, helpfully divided into sections: an introductory discussion of the exten-sive literature on Descartes, including helpful information about existing biblio-graphical sources; primary texts by Descartes; primary texts by other authors as-sociated with Cartesianism; secondary texts on Descartes; secondary texts on otherauthors associated with Cartesianism; and Internet resources.One unexpected, and somewhat delightful, result of reading the text sys-tematically frombeginning to end is the expanded and deep sense that the readergets ofDescartes’s life and the kind of thinker hewas. This proves to be a valuablesupplement to the deliberate summary of his life, times, and philosophy pro-vided in the introduction.Of course, the typical reader of this text, who is not aptto start reading at the beginning and continue through to the end, is unlikely toget this expanded understanding of this great philosopher. But this does notchange the fact that the entries as a whole do seem to add up to more than theirsum.Perhaps the volume’s greatest strength is in its impeccable coverage of math-ematics and various fields in what we now call science. This strength is unsur-prising given comments in the preface and reader’s note at the outset of thevolume, comments that explicitly aim to expand our understanding of Des-cartes’s philosophy and philosophy of the seventeenth century to include topicsin mathematics and a range of various disciplines we now collect under the wideumbrella of science:We usually divide the history of the philosophical world into periods . . .and teachmodern philosophy beginning with René Descartes and endingwith Immanuel Kant. The reason for this involves a view of modern phi-losophy as consisting of two distinct camps: continental rationalists . . . andBritish empiricists. . . .While there is some truth in the simple schema we teach, its greatestdeficiency is that it misses too much of the real Descartes. In the 17th cen-tury, Descartes was known as well, if not more, for his achievements inmathematics, physics, cosmology, physiology, philosophical psychology,and so forth. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Descarteson practically every aspect of seventeenth-century thought, even such far-flung subjects as geology and medicine. (xiii)Furthermore, “The entries cover not only figures whomwe now recognize asphilosophers and topics we now categorize as philosophical, but also figures whomwe might recognize as scientists and topics that we categorize as scientific” (xv).This strength is also unsurprising given the research expertise of the authors, themajority of whom write on these features of early modern philosophy in gen-HOPOS | The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science346eral and of Descartes in particular. The result is a volume with about as extensiveand informed a coverage of mathematics and natural philosophy as they relate toDescartes as one might hope for.I have a small worry associated with this strength, and this is that someentries are oddly short, while others are oddly long. “Mind” is afforded half apage (236–37), while “animal spirits” has over two pages devoted to it (23–26).This imbalance is somewhat mitigated in some cases by the rich array of entriesassociatedwith the primary entry.Again, “mind” is cross-referencedwith11 furtherentries (e.g., “intellect,” “sensation,” “cogito”), and after the entry on mind one isinvited to “see also” an additional five entries (e.g., imagination, immortality, will[237]). Moreover, it is true that early to mid-twentieth-century investigations ofDescartes were skewed toward topics of interest to philosophers of those de-cades of the twentieth century, and that the expansion to include mathematicsand natural sciences is, indeed, truer to Descartes himself and the seventeenthcentury itself. And finally, some of the five authors tend to produce tighter, shorterentries (e.g., Schmaltz, who produced the entry on mind), while others tend towrite longer, more detailed entries (e.g., Verbeek, the author of “animal spirits”).These qualifications notwithstanding, there are the occasional imbalances in en-try length, where topics more central to Descartes’s own thought are somewhatterse while other more marginal topics enjoy more coverage.Of greater concern is the almost complete lack of coverage of some topics andfigures. The strength of the volume—its attention to mathematics and naturalphilosophy—is intricately related to this weakness, for they both emerge owingto the research profiles of the authors. One especially jarring omission is the vol-ume’s almost complete silence on the women who write on Descartes or who aresquarely in the Cartesian tradition or who are in various anti-Cartesian traditions.Elisabeth and Queen Christina are the two women with their own entries, and thisis to be expected given that Descartes’s correspondents have entries of their own.But that’s it. A few women are mentioned in passing in other entries; Mme deSévigné is quoted under the entry for René le Bossu, calling him a Cartesian (206).But where is Mary Astell, who published over half a dozen major texts in phi-losophy, clearly engaged with Cartesian philosophy? Where is the primary entryon Margaret Cavendish, who sat at dinner with Descartes in Paris and publishedwidely, including half a dozen or so texts in philosophy, several of which explic-itly, and in a sustained way, grapple with Descartes’s metaphysics and naturalphilosophy? Cavendish does, somewhat depressingly, get a sentence of men-tion in the primary entry afforded her husband, an entry that makes clear thatthe husband has very little engagement with Cartesian philosophy itself. Whereis Emilie Du Châtelet, the eighteenth-century intellectual powerhouse who treatedthe demise of Cartesianism in France with admirable evenhandedness and aBook Reviews | FA L L 2016347command of the technical underpinnings of both Cartesianism and its victoriousrival,Newtonism?Another eighteenth-century French intellectual (Voltaire) with afar blunter grasp of the mathematics, physics, and metaphysics of these two grandtraditions is granted a mention in the introduction (14), but not his philosophi-cal and mathematical superior, Du Châtelet. The list could go on. Research andteaching attention to the natural philosophy of Descartes and others in the sev-enteenth century has been going on for about 40 years now, so it has become afairly standard part of our thinking about this period and its philosophers. Re-search interest in the contributions of the many sharp women writing in this pe-riod is comparatively new, but it has cascaded over the course of the past 5 yearsor so. This is now an exceedingly active area of research; it is no longer a mar-ginal area of scholarly concern. And it is an ethically important area of researchif we are to have a full and balanced understanding of our philosophical past.Yet almost nowhere is this field of research reflected in this book.Just as mid-twentieth-century philosophers viewed the philosophical pastthrough the lens of topics of interest to them, so too do the authors view thisperiod and Descartes through the lens of their own research interests. And so,too, does this reviewer read this book through the lens of her own research in-terests. In doing so, I have underscored what I see as a major lacuna in thevolume. There is nothing wrong, in my view, with taking a focused view ofthe past through one’s own research interests; to underscore a point made above,the strength of this volume in its powerful treatment ofmathematics and naturalphilosophy is undergirded by precisely this focused view. But a wider diversity ofresearch expertise among the authors would have lent the book a greater balanceof strengths. It could have, for example, paid due heed to the great diversity ofthinkers who, in the seventeenth century—and today—sit at philosophy’s table.Karen Detlefsen, University of PennsylvaniaOhad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith, eds. The Life Sciences in Early ModernPhilosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+256. $78.00 (cloth).Can we still assume that there is a difference in essence between life and me-chanical motion, between natural beings and machines? Should we posit a dif-ference between life and intelligence, between bodily functions and minds?These are some of the questions addressed in this remarkable collection of es-HOPOS | The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science348

Roger Ariew, Dennis Des Chene, Douglas M. Jesseph, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Theo Verbeek. Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. 408. $115.00 ; $109.99

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Roger Ariew, Dennis Des Chene, Douglas M. Jesseph, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Theo Verbeek. Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. 408. $115.00 ;$ 109.99

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Roger Ariew, Dennis Des Chene, Douglas M. Jesseph, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Theo Verbeek. Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. 408. 115.00;115.00 ; 115.00;109.99

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Roger Ariew, Dennis Des Chene, Douglas M. Jesseph, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Theo Verbeek. Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. 408. $115.00 ;$ 109.99