Descartes’ Biography as a Guide to His Meditations

Abstract

The Meditations are often read as if Descartes proposed substance dualism as a theory of human nature. Familiarity with the research project that occupied the author’s adult life suggests an alternative interpretation. Between 1629 and his death in 1650, Descartes consistently argued that scholastic natural philosophy was a bankrupt explanatory system, and that substantial forms were merely names for phenomena that remained unexplained. He therefore sketched outlines of how some mental phenomena, such as sensations, imagination, memory, and the passions, might be explained physically. He had to conclude, however, that human consciousness was not reducible to the theories of matter in motion that were available in 1641. The conclusion of the Meditations is not an endorsement of substance dualism, but a recognition of the theoretical limitations of Descartes’ natural philosophy, which are unfortunately expressed within the semantic limitations of scholastic Latin.