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BOOK REVIEWS 613 indices (319-73), including an Index of Arguments and Principal Themes, an Analytical Index, and an Index of Cited Authors. The overall utility of this book will be limited by the fact that it is written in Italian, but this is the common fate of books which do not use English. This may be unfortunate but seems inevitable these days. English versions of books like Girgenti's would be useful and welcome. CHRISTO$ EVANGELIOU Towson State University John Cottingham, editor. Reason, Will, and Sensation: Studies in Descartes'sMetaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. ix + 333. Cloth, $55.oo. This collection consists of fourteen papers commemorating the Meditations's 35oth anniversary. Two groups of papers are noteworthy: those which address problems surrounding the will, a topic not treated in other recent anthologies, and those which extend current debate on the nature of sensation. Vere Chappell carefully presents both the freedom and causation of volition in "Descartes's Compatibilism." Chappell argues that the will's dependence on God and the mind and its determination by clear and distinct perceptions can be made consistent with Descartes's definition of free acts as spontaneous acts. An issue left outstanding is whether Descartes adopts a Jesuit criterion for free action: the ability to do or not to do an action. At issue is a letter to Mesland of 9 February 1645, which states that upon a clear and distinct perception, "although morally speaking we can hardly move in the contrary direction, absolutely speaking we can" (AT VII 173; CSMK ~45). Michelle Beyssade, in "Descartes's Doctrine of Freedom: Differences between the French and Latin Texts of the Fourth Meditation," convincingly argues that although the Latin edition of the Meditations explicitly denies that a two-way power to act is necessary for free action, the French edition does not rule it out. She takes the letter to Mesland as evidence of acceptance of the Jesuit criterion which then underlies the textual changes. "Truth, Error, and the Order of Reasons: Descartes's Puzzling Synopsis of the Fourth Meditation," by Donald Cress, and "Human Nature, Reason, and Will in the Argument of Descartes's Meditations," by Peter Schouls treat the significance of Descartes 's doctrine of will in the overall argument of the Meditations. Schouls argues that the will is prior to reason in the argument that the mind is autonomous in volition and knowledge. In "Descartes's Denial of the Autonomy of Reason," Howard Wickes argues that, in the Meditations, Descartes presents reason as inadequate for attaining absolute knowledge, by citing the dependence of necessary truths on God's will (it should be noted that some commentators draw the opposite conclusion from this dependence), and the dependence of psychological certainty on the natural light. However, as the papers by Schouls and ChappeU make dear, autonomy is best understood as belonging to the mind itself, and not to the will and reason, or another faculty, as Wickes treats the natural light. Margaret Wilson, in "Descartes on Sense and 'Resemblance'," agrees with recent 614 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 commentators that Descartes denies that the causal process of perception involves the awareness of intermediaries. However, when addressing our epistemological position, he clearly states that mental intermediaries are involved in perception. She suggests an explanation of this, and then gives a plausible interpretation of resemblance claims between ideas and objects. LiUiAlanen in "Sensory Ideas, Objective Reality, and Material Falsity," and Ann Wilbur MacKenzie in "The Reconfiguration of Sensory Experience ," discuss, in part, whether sensations have objective reality. Alanen gives an account of material falsity according to which sensations do have objective reality, but MacKenzie's account, which involves distinguishing between sensations, which do not represent and have no objective reality, and concepts of sensations, which represent sensations, is clearer. The main thesis of MacKenzie's paper is that the Opticscontains a new theory of represerLtation, inclusive of sensory ideas, in which a causal nexus replaces resemblance. However, later, sensory ideas are no longer taken to represent, since they do not exhibit their causes. The collection begins with three unrelated papers gathered under the tide "Reason , History, and Method." Stephen Gaukroger...

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