John Sutton                                 Back to the course home page for this Honours class in 2000.
Tel. (02)-9850-8817, or email.        Back to my home page.

Reading:
Peter Dear, 'A Mechanical Microcosm: bodily passions, good manners, and Cartesian mechanism',
        in C. Lawrence and S. Shapin (eds), Science Incarnate: historical embodiments of natural
        knowledge (Chicago UP, 1998), 51-82 [distributed in class]
John Sutton, 'The Cartesian Philosophy of the Brain' [extracts], in Philosophy and Memory Traces:
        Descartes to connectionism (Cambridge UP, 1998) [distributed in class]
Carolyn Merchant, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1980), chapters 8-9 on
        17th-century mechanism: a powerful statement of the 'death of nature' interpretation of Cartesian
        natural philosophy [multiple copies in Macquarie Library].

Links:
Descartes on mind and brain: a few good Cartesian pictures and quotes from Steven Jones' 'Brain Project'. This will
        give you a basic background on the wonderful and weird Cartesian philosophy of the brain.
'Descartes the Dreamer' by Anthony Grafton [accessible from Macquarie Uni computers], The Wilson Quarterly 20
        (1996): well-written survey of Descartes' life, work, and recent Cartesian scholarship.
Looksmart links to online Descartes texts: here you can find texts of the Discourse on the Method (read
        part 5 especially), and of The Passions of the Soul (read part 1). I haven't found an online text of the strange
        L'homme/ Treatise on Man, but then it was only fully translated into English in 1972.
Descartes' Natural Philosophy (Routledge, 2000), eds Gaukroger, Schuster, Sutton.
        [This is description and table of contents only. Ask me for copies of particular papers; and come to
        the launch at Sydney Uni on August 17!]
Links to short biographies of Descartes - but next you can go to Gaukroger's biography, listed below.
Sutton, [sorry, this link is now down - email me for a copy]  'Distributed Memory, Coupling, and History' in R. Heath
        et al (eds),  Dynamical cognitive science: Proceedings of the Fourth Australasian Cognitive Science
        Conference (Newcastle, NSW: University of Newcastle, 1999)
Martina Reuter, 'Descartes on human nature, sexual difference, and the passions'

Extra reading:
Gordon Baker & Katherine Morris, Descartes' Dualism (Routledge, 1996), pp.91-100 on machines.
Susan Bordo (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Rene Descartes (Penn State UP, 1999).
T.M. Brown, 'Descartes, Dualism, and Psychosomatic Medicine', in W Bynum (ed), The Anatomy of Madness, vol.1
      (Tavistock Press, 1985), 40-62
Stephen Burwood & Kathleen Lennon, Philosophy of Mind (London, 1998). Read the first and last chapters for a
        well-constructed yet fairly standard caricature of Descartes' role in rendering the human body passive.
Georges Canguilhem, 'Machine and Organism' [1952], reprinted in S. Kwinter & J. Crary eds, Incorporations (Zone
        Books, 1992); or extracts in Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist (Zone Books, 1994), 227-232.
John Cottingham, 'The Self and the Body: alienation and integration in Cartesian ethics', Seventeenth-
        Century French Studies 17 (1995), 1-13. Excellent short account [see me for a copy].
Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: an intellectual biography (Oxford, 1995). Entertaining, authoritative, sophisticated.
Emily Grosholz, Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction (Oxford, 1991), chapter 6 on Descartes'
        physiology: the accusation is that mechanism and complexity cannot consistently coexist.
Susan James, Passion and Action: the emotions in 17th-century philosophy (Oxford, 2000).
Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins UP, 1986). Pits
        Cartesian authoritarianism in physiology, technology, and politics against an alleged growing commitment to liberty
        in English natural philosophy and social thought. See especially pp.62-7, 117-122.
Amelie Rorty, 'Descartes on Thinking with the Body', in J. Cottingham (ed), The Cambridge Companion to
        Descartes (Cambridge, 1992), 371-392. Brilliant synthesis of Cartesian psychophysiology [in Macquarie Library]
Tim Reiss, 'Denying the Body? Memory and the dilemmas of history in Descartes', Journal of the History of
        Ideas 57 (1996), 587-607. Wonderful, wise paper on the Cartesian legacy and cross-cultural body matters.
Steven Shapin, 'Descartes the Doctor: rationalism and its therapies', British Journal for the History of Science 33
      (June 2000), 131-154. New paper by leading historian & sociologist of science [see me for a copy].
William R Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion: the scientific career of Rene Descartes (Canton, MA, 1991),
        pp.111-120 on Descartes and magic.

John Sutton
Dept of Philosophy
Macquarie University.

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Last updated 10 April 2002.