Descartes: A Biography

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Death in Sweden 

The following books of Ren ́e Descartes, until they are corrected:

First Philosophy, in which God’s existence and the distinction of the human soul from the

body is demonstrated. To which are added various objections of learned men, together with

the author’s replies.Amsterdam,.

Comments on a Certain Manifesto towards the end of.

Letter to Father Dinet of the Society of Jesus, the Provincial Superior of the Province in

France.

Letter to the very famous man, Gisbertus Voesius[sic].

The Passions of the Soul, a book written in French by the same author. Now made available

in Latin to a wider world by H.D.M.I.V.L.Amsterdam,.

Philosophical Works.

By decree ofNovember.

Decisions of theIndex of Forbidden Bookswere understood strictly in the

tradition of church law. That meant that only those editions of a book that

were specifically mentioned in theIndexwere banned. Evidently, there

were many editions available, in,ofDescartes’ works. What initially

looks like a list of different publications is in fact simply the two books

that had been consulted by Tartaglia.

TheLatin version of theMeditationswas the third edition that was

published in Amsterdam by Louis Elzevier.Since Descartes had died

earlier that year, the publisher decided to include a few supplementary

texts that he had originally published independently. These included the

Comments on a Certain Manifesto, which represented Descartes’ attempt to

defend the substance dualism of theMeditationsagainst Regius’ reduction

of thought to some kind of activity in the brain. This should have seemed,

even to Roman censors, to be a genuine effort by Descartes to defend the

church’s teaching about the immortality of the human soul rather than

an insidious effort to compromise its spirituality. Likewise, theLetter to

Voetiuswould hardly have attracted the attention of Roman censors as a

separate text, unless the Vatican wished to defend in public a notorious

Calvinist critic of ‘papism’. The only rationale for including these specific

items on theIndexwas that they were included in theedition of the

Meditations.Apart from that, the only other book identified on the list was

the Latin translation of thePassions(). That text is explicitly dualist in

the opening sections of Part I, and, although Descartes presented the work

as that of a natural philosopher, there are no explicit passages in which he

rejects anything that was taught as a matter of faith by the various councils

of the Catholic Church.