This hoard of essays has been collected from the past thirty years of Cottingham's Cartesian scholarship. A good few of them have proved of lasting interest, innovative, and supplying new direction to the field. They are separated here under three headings (Descartes's Position in Philosophy, Mind and World, and Ethics and Religion) and appear without modification, ‘warts and all’, leaving Cottingham's more recent assessments confined to a short overview, The Synoptic Philosopher. Sadly, this means that the engaging and generative debates since spawned from these papers are largely ignored. However, there is certainly lasting value to this collection since it demonstrates clearly Cottingham's over-arching program: to defend Descartes from his frequent detractors and to – sometimes radically – contemporize his philosophy.
Reading these papers, three aims to Cottingham's project become immediately obvious: Firstly, he intends to reposition Descartes within (or, at least, nearer) the Aristotelian-Scholastic canon. Secondly, he attempts to show how Cartesianism can enrich current philosophical research. And thirdly, and perhaps most famously, he tries to absolve Descartes of the multiple sins of Dualism.
The problems of the dualistic framework are standard undergraduate fare and, according to Cottingham, a Cartesian caricature is often the ‘dummy on which to drape [such] suspect doctrines’ (3). He claims that the attribution of an inflexible dualism makes Descartes erroneously appear to subscribe to intolerable theses such as ‘Cartesian Privacy’ (19–23 and ‘“The only sure sign…” Thought and Language in Descartes’) and the ‘monstrous’ view that non-human animals do not feel (26–29 and ‘“A Brute to the Brutes?”’). The latter paper is typical of Cottingham: seeing Descartes attacked for supposedly brutish behavior, he rushes to defend him – like the faithful Monsieur Grat – and revives a staid old debate with considerable present-day relevance. Descartes is lampooned (by, among others, Boyce Gibson, Kemp Smith and Peter Singer) for conceiving of animals as unthinking machines, lacking sensation. So says Cottingham who attempts to show why the statement that animals do not think does not result in the thesis that they do not feel – even though this is directly contrary to the assertion in the second meditation that sensation is a property of res cogitans. Cottingham attempts to establish this by citing a Cartesian distinction between (i) self-conscious awareness of sensation, and (ii) feeling that falls short of reflective mental awareness (167–8) proposing that only the first is a necessary correlate of thinking things. He substantiates this further with reference to various letters where Descartes explicitly grants animals sensation (‘“Impulses of anger, fear, hunger…expression of one of its feelings”’ 169).
As mentioned, this volume fails to deal with the responses to these papers – and concerning ‘“A Brute to the Brutes?”’ there is no discussion of, for example, Peter Harrison's pertinent criticisms of this translation of ‘feeling’. (Harrison has it that where Cottingham parses passion as ‘feeling’, i.e. in some sense phenomenological, the Cartesian reading of ‘passion’ is rather metaphorical, that is, purely mechanical (Peter Harrison, ‘Descartes on Animals’ The Philosophical Quarterly, April, 1992).) Nor is there any mention here of the influence of literary fashions, and the part they may have played in shaping the text. In and of itself, this is unusual for Cottingham who not only continually emphasizes the importance of attending to Descartes' rhetoric but who is also incredibly precise with the style of his own work (writing often on the sins of the Harvard footnote system (e.g. vi)). Descartes' project, crudely put, is anti-sceptic – and, as Lex Newman has recently noted (‘Unmasking Descartes’ Case for the Bête Machine Doctrine', Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Sept 2001), a common sceptical trope of the period was theriophily, the glorification of animals. We find examples of this, famously, in Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond, with stories about the industriousness of bees, their warfare, the intricate dances of elephants, and the intelligence and language of cats. (‘It is no great marvell’, Montaigne writes of the beasts, ‘if we understand them not: no more doe we the Cornish…’) The aim of these accounts was not to elevate animals, but to emphasize the frailties of man's reason. Anyone, like Descartes, wishing to distance themselves from the sceptical hypothesis, could do so, on a rhetorical level, by assuming an anti-theriophilic position, that is, by denigrating the reason of animals. Cottingham does not countenance this as a possible factor in the construction of Descartes (so-called) ‘Monstrous Thesis’.
The inclusion of a few (non-Harvard) footnotes here and there might have been helpful, to acknowledge the trajectory of the debate since the piece was first published. However, it must be said that such omissions inevitably make for a sharper read, preserving the impact of Cottingham's central message here: that there is something undeniably mysterious about Descartes' account of both non-human and human sensation.
‘Nature [teaches me] by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.’ This avowal in the sixth meditation sits awkwardly next to the common view of Descartes' strict dualism. Sensation and, to an extent imagination are ‘hybrid’ faculties that seems to require a union of the body with the mind. In this respect ‘“A Brute to the Brutes?”’ prefigures ‘Cartesian Trialism’ another key paper in this collection, where Cottingham supposes that there is ‘a third category or “notion” alongside thought and extension’ (187) – man qua embodied being. This departure from classic dualism is an original escape-route from Descartes' detractors (Gilbert Ryle, for instance, or Daniel Dennett), and allows him alternatives to the much-maligned dogma of dualism.
Further, Cottingham's emphasis on the mind/body union ties Descartes closer to his scholastic predecessors – like Eustachius – who configured the soul as ‘genuinely and substantially united to the body’ (6). The continuity between Descartes' system and that of the scholastics is the subject of ‘A New Start? Cartesian Metaphysics…’ and ‘The Cartesian Legacy’ – and is one that is thoroughly worthwhile. While Cottingham considers Descartes a genuine innovator in respect of his scientific programme, he demonstrates how his metaphysical enquiries derive from the medieval and Renaissance writers Descartes studied in his youth (77). The appropriate placing of Descartes within an established philosophical tradition will do much to undermine the constant and problematic caricatures of a revolutionary ‘genius’, the so-called ‘father of modern philosophy’.
Behind these papers is a drive, to get Descartes ‘right’, to separate the fact from the fictions drawn by his critics – but this sits sometimes rather awkwardly with some of the other aims of Cottingham's Cartesian project. He consistently condemns those who retroject modern philosophical assumptions onto Descartes, e.g. our present concerns with qualia and experiential awareness (17), writing: ‘…perhaps more than any other major thinker, Descartes has become a kind of philosophical icon, displayed … in a confusing variety of guises.’ (253) And yet he too consistently ascribes to Descartes ideas that are at best only ‘consistent’ with the texts (186). This kind of contemporizing, like the trialism, seems an inevitable consequence of combating recent Cartesian criticisms (e.g. ones based on modern neurophysiological advances (173)).
We should also note that while defending Descartes, Cottingham himself is happy to caricature opposing positions. In ‘The Cartesian Legacy’, for example, he describes the post-analytic project of Richard Rorty – considered briefly as an alternative to Cartesian Rationalism – in the following way: ‘We could, of course, give up science and philosophy – cease, as we have recently been urged to do, to use such expressions as “discovering the truth”, and retreat into the labyrinths of post-epistemological anarchism within which the physicist or philosophy has the status of a poet…’ (93) For Cottingham, Descartes' attempt to describe reality as it actually is, though he often falls short in this (92), is infinitely preferable to the relativistic miasma of ‘post-modernism’ (Cottingham's label for the Rortian attitude – though many post-modernists, and many Rortians, would contend it). This is something of a disservice to Rorty, who never considered himself a relativist, and unfairly undermines the credibility of the various pragmatist anti-Cartesian critiques. Indeed, it typifies a general failure on Cottingham's part to engage with much of the more adventurous Cartesian scholarship. Perhaps the most noticeable omission here, is of the considerable, and fascinating body of feminist and psychoanalytic literature, specifically focused on Descartes (to fill this void I fully recommend Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, edited by Susan Bordo). For an author aiming to show how Descartes can, after 400 odd years of scientific, philosophical and societal upheaval, still provide a true understanding of our nature (187), this seems to be something of an oversight, and suggests a lack of interest in the extensive socio-political issues with reviving even a modified and diluted version of Cartesianism.
Be that as it may, this collection of essays will be of considerable interest to a great number of students and scholars of modern philosophy. Among the ones already mentioned, there are papers on Spinoza's critique of the Cartesian theory of judgment (which, unsurprisingly Cottingham configures as, rather than anti-Cartesian, a natural development of Descartes' position), the role of God in Cartesian philosophy, his arguments for the non-inherence of colour, and an absorbing piece on Descartes as sage, which discusses an early passage where he writes of how he will enter the world as though masked ‘larvatus prodeo’, and the significance of this. They are all infinitely readable – Cottingham, like Descartes, puts great emphasis on accessibility, writing in the ‘vernacular' (and for this reason alone has become something of an institution for undergraduates). And these papers demonstrate a profound and exciting knowledge of a philosophical staple, onto which they continually shed new light.
