Cambridge Companion to Descartes 11 Descartes physiology and its relation to his psychology英文电子书.pdfVIP

GARY HATFIELD 7 11 Descartes physiology and its relation to his psychology Descartes understood the subject matter of physics to encompass the whole of nature , including living things . It therefore comprised not only nonvital phenomena, including those we would now de- nominate as physical, chemical, minerological, magnetic, and atmo- spheric; it also extended to the world of plants and animals, includ- ing the human animal (with the exception of those aspects of human psychology that Descartes assigned solely to thinking substance). In the 1630s and 1640s Descartes formulated extensive accounts of the principal manifestations of animal life, including reproduction, growth, nutrition , the circulation of the blood, and especially sense- induced motion . In connection with the latter he discussed at length the bodily conditions for psychological phenomena, including sense perception, imagination, memory, and the passions . He also exam- ined the mental aspects of these phenomena, sometimes by way of complementing his physiological discussions and sometimes as part of his investigation into the grounds of human knowledge. Philosophical readers may be curious about the relation between these scientific pursuits (Descartes would have called them natural philosophical or physical) and Descartes philosophy, where the lat- ter is conceived as his contribution to metaphysics and epistemol- ogy. Descartes physiological and psychological writings bear di- rectly on central topics in his philosophy, notably on the relation between mind and body and on the theory of the senses. With respect to the first, they exemplify Descartes attempt to distin- guish mind (or soul) from body and t