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DESCARTES, RENÉ DU PERRON (b. La Haye,
Touraine, France, 31 March 1596; d. Stockholm,
Sweden, 11 February 1650), natural philosophy, scientific
method, mathematics, optics, mechanics, physiology.
and Regius at Utrecht were among the first. Although
Plempius proved relatively hostile to Cartesian ideas
(his objections were not unlike those William Harvey
was to raise a few years later), Regius became so
enthusiastic that for a time he entered into something
of a student-teacher relationship with Descartes. As
their correspondence for 1641 makes clear, Regius
would send his students' theses to Descartes for comment
and correction. Descartes would then return
them with such specific excisions of classical residues
as “In the first line of the Thesis I would get rid of
these words: vivifying heat.”
The intimate contact between Descartes and Regius
marked the beginning of the direct influence of Cartesian
ideas and modes of thought on seventeenth-century
physiology. That influence was deliberately
continued later, even more vigorously after Descartes's
death, by such influential figures as Thomas
Bartholin and Nicholas Steno. These men, especially
Steno, tried to wed the Cartesian method of mechanistic
explanation to careful anatomical investigation.
Steno was particularly highly regarded by contemporaries
for his perfection of the mechanical theory
of muscular contraction in his Elementorum myologiae
specimen (1667) and for his defense of the Cartesian
physiological methodology in his anatomically sound
Discours sur l'anatomie du cerveau (1669).
Many other prominent seventeenth-century physiological
writers were influenced by the Cartesian
program, either directly by reading Descartes's writings
or indirectly through such followers as Steno.
Among those deeply influenced by Cartesian physiology
were Robert Hooke, Thomas Willis, Jan
Swammerdam, and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli. These
men saw in Cartesian physiology exactly what
Descartes had intended it to be: a method of mechanistic
formulation by which traditional categories of
physiological explanation could be circumvented.
Without Descartes, the seventeenth-century mechanization
of physiological conceptions would have been
inconceivable.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The main primary sources—letters, MSS, and published
works—are all handsomely printed in the Adam-Tannery
Oeuvres de Descartes; vol. XI contains the largest sample
of relevant works.
Useful secondary studies of Descartes's philosophy which
seriously consider his physiological writings range from
Étienne Gilson's Études sur le rôle de la
pensée médiévale
dans la formation du système Cartésien (Paris, 1930) to
Norman Kemp Smith's New Studies in the Philosophy of
Descartes (New York, 1966). Two older monographic studies
are also useful: Bertrand de Saint-Germain's Descartes
considéré comme physiologiste (Paris, 1869) and
Auguste-Georges
Berthier's “Le mécanisme Cartésien et la physiologie
au XVIIe siècle,” in Isis,2 (1914),
37-89, and 3 (1920),
21-58. Some of the background to Descartes's treatment
of vision is made clear in A. C. Crombie, “The Mechanistic
Hypothesis and the Scientific Study of Vision,” in Proceedings
of the Royal Microscopical Society,2 (1907), 3-112;
fundamental aspects of his mechanistic philosophy are
discussed in Georges Canguilhem, La formation du concept
de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe
siècles (Paris, 1955); while
the seventeenth-century impact of Cartesian ideas is studied
by Berthier (op. cit.) and in two helpful general works, Paul
Mouy, Le développement de la physique Cartésienne
(Paris,
1934) and vol. I of Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter
(Chicago, 1969).
A sense of the influence of Cartesian ideas and methods
can also be gleaned from Michael Foster, Lectures on the
History of Physiology (Cambridge, 1901); and Gustav
Scherz's various studies of Nicholas Steno. Finally, see
Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes (Princeton, 1953)
and La Mettrie's “L'homme machine” (Princeton, 1960).