Daniel Schmal

Although Descartes' ideas on consciousness and memory have been widely studied, few attempts have been made to address their systemic relationships. To take a step in this direction, I argue for three interdependent theses. (1) Intellectual memory plays a crucial role in Descartes' concept of consciousness, particularly when it comes to explaining higher forms of consciousness. (2) The link between memory and consciousness has been obscured by the fact that intellectual memory, considered as a subject in its own right, is relatively neglected in Descartes' philosophy: his views on the question seem to remain within the limits of late scholastic narratives. (3) What makes Descartes' question of intellectual memory fascinating is not a new revolutionary insight into the nature of memory but the progressive recognition of the role that memory plays in the constitution of higher forms of consciousness. By providing an analysis of the correspondence of Descartes of 1648 with Antoine Arnauld, where he goes beyond a substance based approach to the self, I try to show that Cartesianism deserves a more important place in the history of self and personality than it was granted.

In this paper I argue that the conceptual basis for the Leibnizian concept of force does not derive only from Hobbes and other early modern authors, but it owes much to late scholasticism as well inasmuch as it depends on the theory of univocal predication elaborated by Duns Scotus. To achieve this goal, first I show that the conceptual content of the term "conatus" has much to do with Leibniz’s criticism of Descartes’s ontological proof.

The famous 'amour-pur' debate – opposing Bossuet to his former protégé, Fénelon, and Nicolas Malebranche to his one-time follower, François Lamy in the last decade of the seventeenth century – can be seen as polarizing the interpretations of the same corpus of traditional texts. Almost all participants in the debate refer to very similar theological formulations of love and call the same authors to witness to bolster their positions. The multiple meanings of the texts and the polysemantic character of the terms gave rise to solutions that pretended to provide the public with authoritative interpretations of the tradition. Inspecting the texts, one can easily discern a common language and vocabulary used indiscriminately by the antagonists during the debate. I will identify two common features that, I will argue, should be related to each other: the theme of illusions and the repeated reference to the idea of order.

Comparisons between late scholastic authors and seventeenth-century philosophers belonging to the “modern” camp are often limited to the analysis of their respective ideas either in terms of continuity and discontinuity or, in a more sociological vein, in relation to their methodology and social background. Taking another perspective, in this article I propose to analyze some literary and argumentative techniques employed by late scholastic writers to integrate new elements into traditional wisdom. The authors chosen for this study, Nicolás Martínez SJ (1617–1676) and Leonard Lessius SJ (1554–1623), illustrate how late scholastic writers treat the Patristic and medieval heritage when they use authoritative texts for innovative purposes. Although ecclesiastical "auctoritas" continues to serve as the basis for theological argumentation in their texts, the case studies highlight how making distinctions among meanings allegedly present in the tradition, along with other “techniques of alignment,” are employed to integrate new ideas and fulfil the need for conformity at the same time.

The article provides an overview of the debates on the nature of free will in the wake of Luis de Molina’s Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis. The controversy which followed the publication of this groundbreaking theological synthesis in 1588, is approached here from the perspective of broader social developments which social historians associate with the phenomenon called functional differentiation. From this angle, Molina’s campaign for a libertarian concept of the will is not only a domestic affair for theologians, it is one of the milestones of modernity, as it gives rise to new-style approaches to the unity of a systemic whole. The unity of the universe, in Molina, is not a given, it is the result of processes of integration intended to coordinate various metaphysical domains which can no longer be held together by the all-encompassing emanative causality of God. The reason is that Molina’s account of freedom does not allow God to govern the world by his own causal activity, for no intelligence, not even an infinite one, can know with certainty the outcome of a decision from any source, other than the decision itself. By consequence, God’s causal participation in events cannot be the true basis of his knowledge of the future. From the fact that libertarian concepts of free will sever the internal link between human action and providential causation so that they cannot be reduced to one another, it follows that the autonomous systems resulting from this situation must mutually accommodate each other externally, by some complementary mechanisms of coordination. Coordinating mechanisms (such as middle knowledge, God’s noetic supereminence over his creatures, and congruism) are needed to ensure the smooth functioning of the system as a whole. Based on the analysis of these systemic requirements, it will be argued that Molina’s proposal, as well as its modulations in the congruist systems of Bellarmino and Suárez, are early attempts to provide a theory of functionally coordinated autonomous systems, which play a foundational role in modernity.

In the second book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke famously described the human mind as 'a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without'. Locke's simile, based on a well-known optical device, the camera obscura, proved to be a highly influential metaphor of what has been called by many commentators 'the Cartesian paradigm of cognition'. What is meant by this term is an indirect realist view of the human cognition. In the last decades, however, this line of interpretation has been challenged by scholars attributing to Descartes, Arnauld, and Locke direct realist, exter-nalist, or more sophisticated internalist accounts of the mind-world relation. Though these claims, I assume, are basically sound, they are weakened by the fact that the camera obscura unquestionably dates back to the seventeenth century as a cognitive metaphor. Since, to the best of my knowledge, no attempt has been made to explain away this latent contradiction, in this paper I intend to make up for this lack by reconstructing the historical role of the camera obscura in cognitive contexts. My conclusion will be that far from undermining a more balanced view, a closer look at the way in which this optical device entered the philosophical stage may provide good reasons to doubt the myth of the 'camera obscura-model'. My understanding of the issue rests on three considerations. (1) The power of the metaphor stems from the fact that any perceptual acquaintance with the world requires a set of modifications (limitations, replacements or substitutions etc.) much in the same way as scientific instruments transform physical data. (2) These modifications do not rule out a direct cognitive contact with the environment. (3) Consequently, what seems to be highlighted by the metaphor is not so much the enclosed nature of the mind, as the manner in which our cognitive machinery comes into contact with external reality by setting up conditions under which external objects can present themselves to a finite being.

One of the most intriguing challenges against Descartes’s mechanistic view of animals in early modern times centered on mental states that were supposed to belong to animal perception, but seemed irreducible either to the mechanism of the res extensa, or to the conscious operations of the res cogitans. What this objection suggests is that between the uncontroversial cases at the two extremes (mechanical responses and reflective awareness), there is an intermediate domain, a gray area of cognition so to speak, where an immaterial agent performs unconscious operations. Such an intermediate domain is crucial for understanding animal life, because it allows the proponents of the anti-Cartesian case to maintain that animals, incapable of reflection, go beyond the limits of the pure mechanism. This area of uncertainty between higher cognition and the lower mechanism plays a prominent role in the philosophical essay by David-Renaud Boullier (1699-1753) "Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes" (1728). As this book is the most elaborate study of the early 18th century on the animal soul, it lends itself as an ideal starting point for examining the question. Boullier's thought has original aspects, but just as interesting is the way in which he summarized and combined the most important intellectual tendencies of his time. In this article, I want to contribute to our understanding of Boullier’s thinking by focusing on his views on unconscious animal perception.

"Scientia" is a long-standing heritage of Aristotelian logic and denotes an epistemic ideal pursued through several centuries. According to Aristotle's (1984) Posterior Analytics, knowledge that conforms to this ideal must consist of propositions that are universally and necessarily true. This necessity can be demonstrated through syllogistic inferences that proceed from premises containing the cause of the conclusion. Accordingly, scientia consisted in a systematic, demonstrative presentation of why things behave the way they do, and not in the discovery of the causes from which demonstrations followed. This ideal started to erode in the Renaissance period. Its various aspects had been challenged and alternative ideals of inquiry had been proposed. As the emphasis shifted from the demonstration of phenomena in accordance with Aristotelian logic and metaphysics to the production of useful knowledge and the standards of intelli-gibility changed, the idea of scientia would be gradually abandoned. Syllogistic inference had been increasingly criticized as incapable of producing useful knowledge, and explanations that appealed to Aristotelian essences started to be perceived as empty or unintelligible. The increasing commitment to observation and experimental practices and an ensuing "culture of fact" replaced the conviction that in natural philosophy there is room only for universally and necessary true propositions, and the development and usefulness of mathematical practices shed doubt on syllogism as the only way through which demonstrative certainty could be achieved.

Although Descartes has often been portrayed as the father of the modern concept of mind, his approach to consciousness is notoriously problematic. What makes it particularly hard to assess his role in the development of the theories of consciousness is the difficulty of clarifying the kind of consciousness he might have in mind when using the associated Latin terms (conscius, cogitatio, conscium esse, etc.). In this article, I analyse Antoine Arnauld’s early interpretation of the passages in Descartes that refer to the issue of consciousness. I argue for two separate but interconnected claims. Firstly, I show that when Arnauld sets out to make a case for Descartes’ concept of cogitatio, he reads the central passages in light of some scholastic theories of cognition, in particular, the concept of ‘reflexio virtualis’ which, far from being a Cartesian invention, comes from the late scholastic discourse. Secondly, I argue that by talking about virtual reflection Arnauld provides an interpretation of Descartes’ views in terms of the intrinsic structure of the first-order thought – a reading which is still plausible, even by our contemporary standards.

Although Descartes' ideas on consciousness and memory have been widely studied, few attempts have been made to address their systemic relationships. To take a step in this direction, I argue for three interdependent theses. (1) Intellectual memory plays a crucial role in Descartes' concept of consciousness, particularly when it comes to explaining higher forms of consciousness. (2) The link between memory and consciousness has been obscured by the fact that intellectual memory, considered as a subject in its own right, is relatively neglected in Descartes' philosophy: his views on the question seem to remain within the limits of late scholastic narratives. (3) What makes Descartes' question of intellectual memory fascinating is not a new revolutionary insight into the nature of memory but the progressive recognition of the role that memory plays in the constitution of higher forms of consciousness. By providing an analysis of the correspondence of Descartes of 1648 with Antoine Arnauld, where he goes beyond a substance based approach to the self, I try to show that Cartesianism deserves a more important place in the history of self and personality than it was granted.

The famous 'amour-pur' debate – opposing Bossuet to his former protégé, Fénelon, and Nicolas Malebranche to his one-time follower, François Lamy in the last decade of the seventeenth century – can be seen as polarizing the interpretations of the same corpus of traditional texts. Almost all participants in the debate refer to very similar theological formulations of love and call the same authors to witness to bolster their positions. The multiple meanings of the texts and the polysemantic character of the terms gave rise to solutions that pretended to provide the public with authoritative interpretations of the tradition. Inspecting the texts, one can easily discern a common language and vocabulary used indiscriminately by the antagonists during the debate. I will identify two common features that, I will argue, should be related to each other: the theme of illusions and the repeated reference to the idea of order.

In this paper I argue that the conceptual basis for the Leibnizian concept of force does not derive only from Hobbes and other early modern authors, but it owes much to late scholasticism as well inasmuch as it depends on the theory of univocal predication elaborated by Duns Scotus. To achieve this goal, first I show that the conceptual content of the term "conatus" has much to do with Leibniz’s criticism of Descartes’s ontological proof.

As in our present age the progressive development of the internet and mobile communication seems to have reshaped even the system of scientific work, in the early modern age it was the appearance of learned journals which left their mark on the outlook of classical science. Though the journals in question belong to a paradigm whose decline is becoming more and more obvious today, it is worth turning back to the origin of this paradigm to have a look at the way it emerged. In this paper I will focus on a scientific journal (the Nouvelles de la République des lettres) selected from among the periodicals of the second half of the seventeenth century to place emphasis on the interaction between new forms of communication and ideas expressing the self-representation of a scientific community in the early modern age.