Descartes : An Intellectual Biography by Stephen Gaukroger (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 157 that grace is a tertium quid that God uses to cause supernatural acts in human potencies, rather than the acts themselves. But if this is the case, then one can no longer appeal to divine transcendence, as Thomas did, to explain why graced human acts are free; for transcendence can be predicated only of God, not of any created reality. This is a technical issue, but a crucial one for maintaining the integrity of Thomas's synthesis. These complaints notwithstanding, the most important point to be made is that there is much to be learned from this very intelligent book. The author's insistence on the evidence for development in Thomas's understanding, his broad reading, his alertness to the interconnectedness of Thomas's ideas, and his willingness to grapple with the details of a text all combine to yield a wealth of insights. Wawrykow has gone a long way toward recovering the "essential spirit" (32) of Thomas's notion of merit, and any serious discussion of the doctrine of merit or of Thomas's theology of grace will have to come to terms with his achievement. Woodstock Theological Center Washington, D.C. J. MICHAEL STEBBINS Descartes : An Intellectual Biography. By STEPHEN GAUKROGER. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xx+ 499. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-19-823994-7 (cloth), 0-19-823724-3 (paper). Those interested in the life of Descartes (1596-1650) are indebted to Adrien Baillet, his first major biographer, whose La vie de monsieur Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1691) provided the details of Descartes's work, travels, friends, correspondents, and so on. We are fortunate too that despite trying circumstances so many of Descartes's letters and replies were preserved by devoted followers in the decades after his death. The French, obviously, celebrated their intellectual hero with regular editions of his writings across the centuries and we are also especially indebted to the editorship of Charles Adam and Paul Tannery for their monumental edition published as Oeuvres de Descartes, 13 vols. (Paris, 1897-1913; 2d ed., 11 vols., Paris, 1974-86). English biographies, as distinct from biographical introductions to a selection of his writings, have been infrequent this century. Elizabeth S. Haldane did a four-hundred-page study (London, 1905) which is most readable and is rich in personal details, though marred somewhat by a tendency to criticize the Catholic Church for insufficient intellectual freedom; Jack Rochford Vrooman published Rene Descartes: A Biography (New York, 1970) which made use of the enormous material French scholars had been 158 BOOK REVIEWS producing from the beginning of the century, and his study is balanced and readable, giving special attention to the relationship Descartes developed with his young friend and disciple, Princess Elizabeth of Palatine, who was living in exile in Holland in the 1640s. Vrooman's study is balanced in the sense that it contains the personal details of where Descartes lived and to whom he wrote, and yet these do not overwhelm the features of his philosophy. Now a different biography has appeared in time to celebrate the fourth centenary of his birth. Unlike previous studies it focuses on his scientific work in contrast to his metaphysics and epistemology. Stephen Gaukroger, a professor at the University of Sydney, and author of several other Cartesian studies, entitles his book Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. The title is appropriate but a more informative subtitle might have been "A Study of Descartes's Contribution to a New Version of Mechanistic Philosophy of Nature." The stages of Descartes's life and travels are not ignored, but the thrust of the work is to spend hundreds of pages working through works such as the Regulae and Le monde, works not published in Descartes's lifetime, analyzing and explaining everything Descartes was attempting as he developed an approach to natural phenomena that was both an alternative to Aristotelianism and a new and original version of the mechanism of the time. Where classical atomism proposed impenetrable particles of matter, Descartes proposed different-shaped corpuscles that mix and slide by each other in such a way they form the basis of everything from light to all the subtleties of the organic...