Cesalpino, Andrea

Reading Descartes

“…This is not arbitrary, but based on good reasons, drawing on what Descartes writes: "there is no more fruitful exercise than attempting to know ourselves" (Description of the Human Body, AT 11,CSM 1,314). And again: those endowed with the use of reason "have an obligation to employ it principally in the endeavour to know [God] and to know themselves" (letter to Mersenne 15 April 1630, AT 1,144;CSMK,22) In this sense, I understand conscientia as self-knowledge in a substantive sense, with metaphysical, epistemic, and moral 2 See Hennig's excellent account. 3 This affinity is drawn out of Socrates' preoccupation with self-examination and the method of elenchus, and of Plato's concern with self-knowledge (see for example, the dialogues mentioned in n. 5).…”

“…Furthermore, his experiences cannot be private, since self-critical reflection and the capacity to suspend one's dubitable beliefs require adopting reason's objective standpoint, "rightly conducting one's reason and seeking the truth" (Discourse, AT 6, 1; CSM 1,111). There is no picture of the so-called inner space in which what I seem to see or hear is accepted as how things are, or considered as infallible or, absurdly, as knowledge.…”

“…Descartes is not, however, in the grip of a fantasy that reason unaided "by imagination, sense-perception and memory" can give us understanding of a world of corporeal objects. 22 He considers observation, pictorial illustrations, experimentation, testing, and correction to be necessary to the spirit of scientific enquiry (Rule Twelve AT 10, 411 passim; also letter to Plempius for Fromondus, 3 October 1637, AT 1,421).…”

“…In his reply to Hobbes, Descartes explains that the intellectual and sensory acts of the mind, which we call 'acts of thought', such as understanding, willing, imagining, having sensory perceptions, and so on […] all fall under the common concept of thought [cogitatio], or perception [perceptio], or conscientia, and we call the substance in which they inhere a thinking thing or a mind […]. [The] acts of thought have nothing in common with corporeal acts, and thought, which is the common concept under which they fall, is different in kind from extension, which is the common concept of corporeal acts (Third Set of Objections with Replies, AT 7, 176; CSM 2, 124; italics added; letter to Mersenne, May 1637, AT 1,366).…”

“…I am "a single person with both body and thought [mind]" (letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, 18 June 1643, AT 3, 694;CSMK, 228). 1 It is Descartes' conception of selfhood that informs his conception of personhood. Once our understanding is freed from intellectual habits that persist in current debates concerning Descartes' metaphysics (see par.…”