Descartes: A Biography

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The Principles of Philosophy() 

Descartes got news that copies of thePrincipleshad arrived in Paris from

Amsterdam.He remained in Brittany until the feast of Saint Louis

(August), after which he returned to Paris. While en route, in September

,heconsulted a lawyer who finalized the transfer of property and

rental income from his brother, Pierre.

Once he returned to Paris, Descartes initiated a marketing strategy for

his new book and at the same time accepted Picot’s offer to prepare a French

translation based initially on a defective copy (without diagrams) that he

had brought with him from Amsterdam in June. The marketing strategy

coincided neatly with efforts to repair the somewhat fraught relations

with the Jesuits that, only four years earlier, he had described as a ‘war’.

Descartes wrote to three Jesuits, Fathers Charlet, Dinet, and Bourdin,

with similar expressions of good will and rather surprising interpretations

of what he thought he was doing in thePrinciples.Inthe case of Bourdin,

he had an opportunity to meet him in person for the first time and to bring

some closure to their earlier dispute.

One of the Jesuits to whom he wrote, Father Charlet, had been rector of

La Fleche from` to, when Descartes was a student there. Having

acknowledged his educational debts,he went on to explain – implausibly

and very surprisingly – how his philosophy assumed no principle that is

not found in Aristotle.

I know that people believed that my views were novel. However, they will see here

that I do not use any principle that was not accepted by Aristotle and by everyone who

ever philosophized. People also imagined that my plan was to refute the views that are

taught in the Schools, and to try to make them ridiculous. But they will see that I do

not mention those views any more than if I had never learned them. (iv.)

This was surely an extraordinary commentary on the novelty of his ideas

and the motivation of his whole intellectual project. He gave a similar

commentary to Father Dinet, whom he credited with resolving the dis-

pute with Father Bourdin. He suggested that some unidentified people

had tried ‘to smother [his philosophy] before its birth’ (iv.), but that

they would now find that it was ‘more innocent than they anticipated’.

However, readers might still find reason to criticize it, because it omitted

any explanation of animals and plants and dealt only with inanimate bod-

ies. This suggests another reason for the omission of these topics. It was

not simply that Descartes had not yet completed the research required to

discuss them adequately; it was also evident that they raised more sensitive