Descartes and the Enlightenment (review)

t38 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:1 JANUARY 1992 Chapter 5). This reading of Maimonides is not uncontroversial, but it does help Fox reduce the tensions between the two Maimonides. Still, while his argument makes good use of Aristotle (and, for contrast, Aquinas) Fox does relatively little to place Maimonides in the context of specificallymedievalphilosophical thought, as if Maimonides borrowed from ancient sources but was unaffected by medieval Jewish or Arabic writers. This is not the only criticism one may have of an otherwise very useful book. It may seem to be the criddsm of a pedant to note that Fox provides no bibliography. But the absence of a bibliography points to a real problem with this study. Alongside some new material, Interpreting Maimonides reprints articles Fox has published over the last twenty-five .years, in largely the same form, and hardly acknowledges the work of others in that period. If I may quote another appreciative reader of Fox's book, "Fox has written a book on interpreting Maimonides which ignores most other interpreters of Maimonides."s One might be willing to overlook this for the positive contribution the work makes, but it may discredit Fox's claim of a lacuna in Maimonides scholarship (3). In the end, Fox provides a useful study of the Guide which demonstrates not only its philosophical interest, but also its deep roots in rabbinic thought and debate. He reveals a Maimonides for whom philosophy is a necessary discipline, but ancillary to one higher, namely, study of Torah itself (332-33), and provides a coherent and unified view of the very perplexing Guideof thePerplexed. IRVEN M. RESNICK Universityof Tennesseeat Chattanooga Peter A. Schouls. Descartesand the Enlightenment. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas, t 3. Kingston and Montreal: McGilI-Queen's University Press, t989. Pp. 194. Cloth, $29.95. Schouis demonstrates that "the spreading of the Enlightenment amounted to the growing acceptance of an integral part of Descartes's position, the Cartesian concepts of freedom, mastery, and progress" (l 2). If readers are not convinced that "Descartes is the most important formative influence on eighteenth-century French thought" (174), many will agree that "Descartes... should replace Bacon" to stand with Locke and Newton as "the Enlightenment trinity of greatest men in history" (173)That done, Schouls's main thesis is an interpretation of a revolutionary Descartes who rejects all previous beliefs to establish an extreme autonomous individualism. This revolution involves "radical substitution of everything within a certain [Aristotelian] framework and of that framework itself" 04)- Thus "Descartes takes free will, not reason, to be primary" (39) and "this gives freedom a place even more basic than that s Menachem Kellner, "Reading Rambam: Approaches to the Interpretation of Maimonides," forthcoming inJewishHisto~5/2 (1991): n. 41. Kellner, by the way, is one scholar whose work Fox does not ignore. Kellner's article contains a lengthy treatment of Fox's book, and I thank him for the opportunity to read his article in manuscript. BOOK REVIEWS 139 of the cogito, for we cannot reach the cogito, nor attain the liberation and validation of reason, apart from acts of free will" (4o). If we accept the view that "unless we presuppose the existence of an autonomous will expressing itself as liberty of opportunity [acts of self-determination (41)], reason cannot be liberated and its true trustworthiness cannot be established" (48), then the crucial question is whether this functional priority of free acts also establishes the metaphysical priority of free will. Schouls argues that the " 'autonomous' will, fi)r Descartes, is guided or determined neither by human reason nor by something apart from the person who originally does the willing, such as God, or an independently existing truth or good" (77), that for Descartes "man is an end in himself" 043), that "as far as philosophizing is concerned it is, for Descartes, irrelevant whether or not God exists" (5 l). Schouls thus agrees with Caton that Descartes is in "rebellion against Christianity" and that "in emancipating itself from all restraints of piety, reason has rejected its most powerful 'prejudice'" (6o). Pascal and Maritain reacted against the fact that "deism or... naturalism characterizes Descartes's work...