The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian Dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body.

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This paper explores the interaction between medicine and metaphysics in modern natural philosophy and especially in Descartes' philosophy. I argue that Descartes hypothetical account of birthmarks in connection with his embryology provides an argumentative proof of the metaphysical necessity of a substantial union between mind and body, which however does not threaten his doctrine of the real distinction between these two substances. It would appear that his argument relies on a temporal conception of alethic modalities and provides a new answer to Henricus Regius who in 1641 claimed that, for Descartes, the human being is an ensper accidens.

Dans cet article, j’examine la thèse classique selon laquelle les désaccords au sujet de l’avortement et de la recherche sur les cellules souches embryonnaires relèvent d’un désaccord plus fondamental relatif à des théories métaphysiques qui fondent ces positions éthiques. Je montrerai que si les positions au sujet du statut moral de l’embryon sont en partie motivées par des conceptions métaphysiques, introduire des arguments métaphysiques dans les débats relatifs à l’éthique de la reproduction ne permet pas de résoudre ce problème.

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