Much of Clarke’s study is taken up with patient exegesis of the way in which this programme was worked out with respect to the human nervous system, in Le Monde, the Traité de L’Homme and the Dioptrique. The Descartes clan was a bourgeois f… So whatever else the notion of res cogitans may or may not do, it clearly plays a central role in the development of Descartes’s theocentric metaphysics. 201). In the context of the argument of the Meditations, which is the focus of this sharp exchange, we should recall that Descartes’s meditator has arrived at a self-conception of the mind which leads him directly forward on the journey to contemplate the “immense light” of the Godhead, the infinite incorporeal being whose image is reflected, albeit dimly, in the finite created intellect of the meditator (AT VII 51: CSM II 35). throughout the nervous system, and how neurons ulti-mately activate muscles to produce movement. He was the youngest of the couple’s three surviving children. Descartes' concept of innate ideas Through analysis of his own thoughts, he determined that some ideas are innate (natural components of the mind). After this mechanistic survey of general physiology, Descartes moves to the nervous system, which he treats in considerable detail. Diagram of the brain and nerves Wellcome L0017000.jpg, File:Descartes; The Nervous System. The pineal gland is attached to the outside of thesubstance of the brain near the entrance of the canal (“aqueductof Sylvius”) from the third to the fourth ventricle of thebrain. Yet at the same time, by drawing a radical ontological distinction between body as extended and mind as pure thought, Descartes, in search of certitude, had paradoxically created intellectual chaos. In addition to the brain and spinal cord, principal organs of the nervous system include the following: Eyes. His mother, Jeanne Brochard, died soon after giving birth to him, and so he was not expected to survive. Diagram of the brain Clarke goes on to trace out how the same corporealist strategy is used by Descartes in his accounts of imagination and memory, and of the passions; and what slowly and securely emerges is a valuable lesson for those who are so beguiled by the modern icon of Descartes the ’Cartesian dualist’ that they assume (a feat possible only if his scientific writings are resolutely ignored) that he must be far more interested in the ’ghost’ than in the machine. Descartes was a mathematician; he didn’t study the nervous system. Much later, in the nineteenth century, pain hypotheses emerged which explained the pain sensation either on the basis of intense stimulation of any kind of nerve fibers (intensity hypothesis) or on the basis of specific nociceptors (specificity hypothesis). The nervous system is defined by the presence of a special type of cell—the neuron (sometimes called "neurone" or "nerve cell"). CC BY 4.0 René Descartes was one of the first Western philosophers to describe a detailed somatosensory pathway in humans. The key motivation behind Descartes’s natural philosophy (including much of his work on the mind) is, for Clarke, the desire to provide a new style of explanation that would replace the scholastic approach that prevailed in the world in which he grew up. Diagram of the brain Wellcome L0006584.jpg, File:Descartes; The Nervous System. The history of Cartesian scholarship over the last half-century has seen significant changes. images@wellcome.ac.uk Reviewed by John Cottingham, University of Reading. Diagram of the brain Rare Books Keywords: Philosophy; Mathematics; Anatomy; Nervous System; Rene Descartes. This is indeed what Gassendi thought he should be doing: it’s no more use telling us you are a ’thinking thing’, he objected, than telling us that wine is ’a red thing’; what we are looking for is the micro-structure that explains the manifest properties (Fifth Objections, AT VII 276: CSM II 193). The latter issue, the irreducibility and sui generis nature of the mental, is of course the one that springs immediately to the fore whenever most modern philosophers talk of the Cartesian conception of the mind; but Clarke’s goal is to show how the actual Descartes was often as much or more preoccupied with working out the physical mechanisms that he saw as underpinning our mentation than he was with abstract arguments about the supposed dualistic separation of the mental from the physical. Descartes’ proposition was based on a basic model of sensory input and motor output managed by the brain. 6 According to Descartes, the nervous system is a network of tiny tubes along which flow the ‘animal spirits’, inner vapours whose origin is the heart. This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it. And the same applies to non-human animals, since as Clarke points out (quite correctly in my view) “Descartes readily concedes to animals everything that takes place in us apart from thought or reasoning” (p. 75).