Descartes as a Physician: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Cartesianism?

Delphine Antoine-Mahut

Venue: online Zoom meeting

Zoom link: https://unive.zoom.us/j/84571640858?pwd=MWFJbFgxRjlnaVJLWUpIOWJwQlZVUT09

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Abstract:

That Descartes considered medicine as the main means of preserving health, i.e. the condition of all other goods in this life, and that consequently he granted health a central place in his research programme was beyond doubt both for him and for his contemporaries. The renewal and fruitfulness of international studies on this point attests that we have no doubts about it today either. However, it has not always been so. In 1865, in a twenty-page text entitled “Descartes médecin,” the spiritualist Albert Lemoine (1824–1874) reacted to the publication of the Œuvres inédites (1859) of Descartes by the Leibnitian diplomat Louis Alexandre Foucher de Careil (1859–1860). These two books brought to the attention of the public Descartes’s physiological fragments not present in his Œuvres complètes (1826), published in eleven volumes by Victor Cousin (1824–1826), and in the abridged edition of his Œuvres philosophiques (1835) in four volumes by Adolphe Garnier (1835–1835). Though, according to Lemoine, this was not enough to explain the specific “insult” perpetrated to an essential part of Descartes’s endeavour, namely medicine, as well as the almost exclusive position that Descartes the “metaphysician” and “psychologist”  of the cogito came to take in the formation of young minds. According to him, “We have known for a long time that Descartes was not only concerned with geometry and physics as well as with philosophy, but also with anatomy and physiology. […] The Œuvres inédites of Descartes reminds us about this. […] [His] L’homme, La formation du fœtus, and Passions did not allow us to ignore that Descartes cultivated the study of the human body and knew its structure as a man of his time. But it is not in these treatises that we will look for Descartes, and we have some reason [for this]” (L’âme et le corps. Etudes de philosophie morale et naturelle, Paris, Didier, 1856, 299). On the ground of the analysis of these historiographical materials, in this paper I will provide a reflection on the nature, the reasons and the eminently philosophical issues underlying this curious collective academic “amnesia.”