Antoine Arnauld: On True and False Ideas, and: Antoine Arnauld: On True and False Ideas: New Objections to Descartes' Meditations and Descartes' Replies (review)

14o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3o: 1 JANUARY 1992 cancellation of those consequences removes all questioning of the trustworthiness of reason" (92-93). I don't think we can not pay attention to the demon once he is introduced, but even if we could, reversion to ignorance to validate reason is no better than trust in God. In any event, Schouis establishes the theses not only that Descartes is a father of the Enlightenment, but also that Descartes is a true, if not the first, Enlightenment thinker. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University Stephen Gaukroger, trans. Antoine Arnauld: On True and False Ideas. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 199o. Pp. vii + 24o. Cloth, $59.95. Eimar J. Kremer, trans. Antoine Arnauld: On True and False Ideas: New Objections to Descartes' Meditations and Descartes' Replies. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 199o. Pp. xxxiv + 198. Cloth, $59-95. Antoine Arnauld (1612--1694) was one of the most important intellectual figures of the seventeenth century. He was recognized by Descartes, Leibniz, and others as a brilliant and rigorous thinker, possessed of a keen and penetrating intellect--the perfect person with whom to test their philosophical insights. And yet, Arnauld has been almost thoroughly ignored by English-speaking philosophers since Thomas Reid, particularly (and, given the way Anglo-American philosophy has been done, most surprisingly) in the last hundred years. His major works, with the exception of the "Port-Royal Logic" (La Logique, ou l'art de penser, the translation of which is now out of print), the Fourth Set of Objections to Descartes's Meditations, and his philosophical letters to Leibniz--a small fraction of his enormous theological and philosophical output--have never been translated into English. Recently, however, this unfortunate situation has begun to change. The past two years have seen the publication of a number of books and articles on Arnauld, and there were two sessions at the 1988 University of Iowa Conference on Ideas in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries devoted to Arnauld and his celebrated debate with Nicolas Malebranche. Now, over three hundred years after its initial publication in 1683, there appears in the same year two English translations (the first ever) of Arnauld's polemical masterpiece, Des vraies et desfausses idees (VFI). Surely, Arnauld's star is on the rise (again). VFI is, by Arnauldian standards, a short work, devoted to a detailed critique of the theory of representative ideas presented by Malebranche in De la recherche de la v~,it.k (1674). The French is rather clear and simple, and I suspect most scholarly research on Arnauld will continue to work primarily directly from the French text. Nonetheless, it is nice to have the translations available, both for teaching purposes and for introducing Arnauld to a wider philosophical audience (he should certainly be read, for example , by those working in the philosophy of mind). Both volumes include introductory essays, and I will comment on these before considering the translations themselves. The introductions by Kremer and Gaukroger complement each other, with almost BOOK REVIEWS 141 no overlap. Kremer's begins with a helpful and informative biographical sketch, followed by some historical background on the Arnauld-Malebranche debate, as well as a general outline of Arnauld's views and of the philosophical and theological differences between Arnauld and Malebranche (with brief allusions to Descartes). His notes provide a particularly good reference source for documents related to the debate. While Kremer does indicate what Arnauld found so objectionable in Malehranche's Trait~ de la nature et de la Grace (whose publication in 168o occasioned the attack on the Recherche ), he does not go into any detail regarding Arnauld's own views on grace and why they aroused such hostility. And yet this was not irrelevant to the debate over representative ideas. Gaukroger's introduction, by contrast, offers us no illumination of the immediate historical and theological context of the debate, no biographical data, and only a very brief discussion of Arnauld's own philosophical views on ideas and perception. Rather, it is an interesting essay tracing the "dissolution" of the Aristotelian account of perception from Scholasticism to Descartes. Curiously, Gaukroger seems to treat Descartes's ideas primarily as corporeal...