Raphaele Garrod

Descartes and the ‘Ingenium’ tracks the significance of embodied thought (ingenium) in the the philosophical trajectory of the founding father of dualism.
The first part of the book defines the notion of ingenium in relation to core concepts of Descartes's philosophy, such as memory and enumeration. It focuses on Descartes’s uses of this notion in methodical thinking, mathematics, and medicine.
The studies in the second part place the Cartesian ingenium within preceding scholastic and humanist pedagogical and natural-philosophical traditions, and highlight its hitherto ignored social and political significance for Descartes himself as a member of the
Republic of Letters.
By embedding Descartes' notion of ingenium in contemporaneous medical, pedagogical, but also social and literary discourses, this volume outlines the fundamentally
anthropological and ethical underpinnings of Descartes's revolutionary epistemology.

This volume stems from a conference which took place at Newnham College, Cambridge, in September 2012. Its intended purpose is to make a case for the importance of Plinian natural history, whose contribution is often overlooked by more traditional genealogies of natural history 'as we know it', in the 17th and 18th century. This case is made  extensively for French Renaissance literature by Dr Rowan Tomlinson in her book, Inventive inventories (Oxford: OUP, forthcoming). Her enthusiasm for this topic proved contagious and prompted this conference.

In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben calls for a reinvestigation of "the question of man and of 'humanism'" which, he says, "must be posed in a new way."2 This reinvestigation is required in order to understand the emergence of State biopolitics, made possible "only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate places."3 He has just explained that these separations and measurements are to be found in the history of the Aristotelian division and categorization of life, which distinguishes between "the animal inside" (a set of blind, unconscious and organic functions, such as breathing, assimilation and excretion) and the "animal outside," involved in a series of relations with its environment.4 Man, the rational animal, crowns these divisions with a further one: "In our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must … investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation."5 The practical (or ethical) and political function of such dualism is central to a certain strand of Renaissance rationalist political theory; its discursive emergence foreshadows what Agamben as a reader of Foucault defines as the biopolitics of the modern state in the seventeenth century, namely the State's attention to the "animal inside," the life expectancy and health of its population. But what of the politics of the "animal outside" preceding that period? In line with Agamben's program, this essay questions the dualist account of man by focusing on the ways in which a second strand of political thought, stemming from the Renaissance reception of Plutarch, has acknowledged the importance of such animality in political life. At stake here is the notion of animal ingenuity as sollertia-the rapid assessment of and response to the environment, which the early moderns often identified as a form or prudence. One of its most fitting emblems in early modern political discourse is that of the fox established by Machiavelli as a model for the prince, as distinct from that of the lion. This chapter thus sketches the history of the discursive handling of "the animal outside" through the early modern French reception of that precept and its classical precursors.6 In so doing it revisits some of the constitutive divisions identified by Agamben as foundational discursive structures of humanist political theories.