Although Descartes has often been portrayed as the father of the modern concept of mind, his approach to consciousness is notoriously problematic. What makes it particularly hard to assess his role in the development of the theories of consciousness is the difficulty of clarifying the kind of consciousness he might have in mind when using the associated Latin terms (conscius, cogitatio, conscium esse, etc.). In this article, I analyse Antoine Arnauld's early interpretation of the passages in Descartes that refer to the issue of consciousness. I argue for two separate but interconnected claims. Firstly, I show that when Arnauld sets out to make a case for Descartes' concept of cogitatio, he reads the central passages in light of some scholastic theories of cognition, in particular, the concept of 'reflexio virtualis' which, far from being a Cartesian invention, comes from the late scholastic discourse. Secondly, I argue that by talking about virtual reflection Arnauld provides an interpretation of Descartes' views in terms of the intrinsic structure of the first-order thoughta reading which is still plausible, even by our contemporary standards.
or early modern readers, Descartes's views on animals were both scandalous and fascinating. His intriguing description of animals in terms of mechanism, coupled with the denial of any immaterial principle operating behind their observable behavior, prompted various critical reactions, which from the second half of the eventeenth century tended to focus on the problem of unconscious perception. On the Cartesian view, human cognition is accompanied by reflective consciousness, and clearly belongs to immaterial beings, whereas bodily interactions rely on mechanical principles. The challenge leveled against this dichotomy attempted to point out that certain mental states are both essential to the animal and irreducible to either bare mechanism or conscious mental operations. What this objection suggests is that between the uncontroversial cases at the two extremes there exists an intermediate realm, a gray zone of cognition as it were where an immaterial agent performs unconscious operations. Such a middle ground is crucial for understanding animal life, for it allows the proponents of the anti-Cartesian case to argue that although animals are incapable of reflexive thought (and for this reason cannot aspire to the highest privilege of immortality) they transcend the limits of pure mechanism. In this manner, unconscious, or not fully conscious, perceptions provide a model for animal cognition. This area of uncertainty between higher cognition and lower mechanism plays a prominent role in David-Renaud Boullier's (1699-1753) Essai philosophique sur l'âme des bêtes. As this book, first published in two volumes in 1728, is the most elaborate early eighteenth-century study of the animal soul, it
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.