Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

Evidently, the conclusion does not follow. Murphy would be equally dead

had someone else killed him, had he died of natural causes, had he died by

accident, and so on. Descartes was unavoidably entangled in the structure

of this type of argument, and he was consciously trying to avoid the sleuth’s

misguided logic. In the case of each natural phenomenon that he claimed to

explain, he began with a description of the observed effects (comparable to

observing that Murphy is dead), and then tried to imagine an appropriate

cause that may have given rise to the effect. However, he knew, as every

student of philosophy knew in the seventeenth century, that he could not

argue from an observed effect to the truth of a hypothetical cause without

being exposed to a notorious fallacy.

One of the first readers to submit objections to Descartes was Libert

Froidmont (–), also known as Fromondus. Froidmont was a pro-

fessor at Louvain who had written a commentary on Saint Paul’s epistles

and a book on meteorology published in.Froidmont had also pub-

lished an anti-Copernican book calledAnti-Aristarchusin, with a

‘privilege’ from Philip IV of Spain. Thus from the perspective of those

in the United Provinces, including Descartes, this was a publication from

enemy territory by a vociferous defender of the church’s stand against

Galileo.It did not augur well for a meeting of minds between Froidmont

and Descartes. However, when Plemp received three copies of Descartes’

book, he passed on copies to Father Fournet and to Froidmont (who had

earlier been his professor of natural philosophy at Louvain), and kept the

third copy for himself.Plemp acted as an intermediary in the ensuing

correspondence between Descartes and Froidmont, almost apologizing

forFroidmont’s replies because of the fundamental philosophical differ-

ences that emerged. When he was forwarding his colleague’s objections, he

acknowledged that the professors in Louvain philosophized in a different

(traditional) style, and that this did not necessarily imply that Descartes

was mistaken. ‘We think differently, because when we were new pots we

were filled with a different smell, which we have retained’ (i.).

The Louvain professor was fundamentally shocked by the Cartesian

attempt to explain the operations of what he called ‘the sensitive soul’

(i.). In the case of animals, Descartes had suggested that their hearing,

seeing, and their ability to move about could all be explained by a single

factor, the heat of their blood. Froidmont could not see how such ‘noble

actions’ could result from such an ‘ignoble and brute cause’, and he wished

to retain the ‘intentional species’ that scholastics imagined as mediating