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Descartes and the Notion of a Criterion of External Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

May Brodbeck
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Extract

Descartes's greatest glory was to be the first to articulate, and systematically to defend, the new scientific ideal of explanation in terms of lawfulness. For the realm of matter, lawful connections replaced anthropomorphic volitions as the model of rational explanation. (That he retained anthropomorphic volitional explanation for the realm of mind is understandable: you cannot expect a man to jump wholly out of his skin. It would prove easier, after Newton, to make the extension to mind.) Descartes's use of explanation in terms of lawfulness, inspired by Galileo's beginnings in this enterprise, was vindicated by Newton's subsequent achievement. Replacement of anthropomorphic agency, by causal mechanism, as the explanatory model, was undoubtedly the most profound of the many effects of the new science on our culture.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 5: Reason and Reality , March 1971 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1971

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References

page 5 note 1 D, ii 68, 115; 1 159. Abbreviation D = The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane, E. S. and Ross, G. R. T. (London, 1934).Google Scholar

page 6 note 1 For a detailed analysis of Brentano's views and, more generally, a far-ranging critique of representationalism, see Bergmann, G., Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong (Madison, 1967).Google Scholar

page 7 note 1 D, 155, 243.

page 10 note 1 D, ii 64.

page 11 note 1 D, 143, 180, 245; ii 100.

page 13 note 1 D, 1164, 237; ii 914, 267.

page 14 note 1 On the three predicaments, see Bergmann, op cit. For a proposed resolution of the scientific predicament, see my ‘Mental and Physical: Identity vs. Sameness’ in Feyerabend, P. K. and Maxwell, G. (eds), Mind, Method, and Matter (Minneapolis, 1965).Google Scholar