Descartes on the Existence and Nature of Material Things

FAIN: FT-229871-15

Jeremy S. Hyman
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Fayetteville, AR 72701-1201)

Summer research and writing on History of Philosophy.

The book proposes an entirely new interpretation of Descartes' Meditations, one that takes the Meditation 6 proof for the existence of material things as not only responding to the skeptical arguments of Meditation 1, but as laying the foundations for a deductive science of nature to be developed in the Principles of Philosophy. I study the argument, in its Meditations and Principles versions; I assess the special role of the Meditations in the Cartesian corpus; and, most generally, I seek to establish Descartes as a major philosopher of body, not just a philosopher of self and of God. The importance of the project for the humanities is twofold: first, it provides a new understanding of what is one of the most important and influential works of the early modern period; and second, it shows how Descartes not only made substantive contributions to the scientific revolution's understanding of body, but also put forward a surprisingly interesting proof to establish its subject matter.