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BOOK REVIEWS 467 which we are told that laws "ought to be the rulers of men, and not men the masters of Laws" (l 11; see also 1o5). Thomas who? Saxonhouse thinks that these discourses show that Machiavelli, not Hobbes, deserves the title of founder of modern political thought, where the criterion of the latter is adherence to the view that "political authority is imposed against, rather than in conformity with, nature" 025). But if that is the criterion, then there are two problems . First, the case for Machiavelli should be made independently of Hobbes's writings . Either Machiavelli had this view or he did not. Hobbes's work is not relevant at all. Second, the Epicureans satisfy the criterion. If the criterion were tightened up in a sensible way to exclude the Epicureans, then I think that it would exclude Machiavelli as well. The editing is objectionable. Although this book purports to be a critical edition, the editors change 'then' to 'than', modernize spelling, change capitalization, change the form of possessive phrases, and so on. Finally, the footnotes to the text explain the meaning of such words as 'conversation', 'cozenage', and 'disreputation'. Who is the audience supposed to be? The complete and accurate text of Horae Subsecivae is available in a photoreprint from Da Capo Press (New York, 197o). I recommend it over the volume reviewed here. A. P. MARTINICH Universityof Texasat Austin Dennis L. Sepper. Descartes'sImagination: Proportion,Images, and the Activity of Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xv + 314- Cloth, $5o.oo. Dennis Sepper, focusing upon the positive role that imagination plays in Descartes's writings, indicates that he seeks to support three "major claims." First, he contends that in Descartes's earliest works, written before x63o, "the cognitive use of imagination was always of central concern and often the fundamental one." Second, he maintains that, in Le Monde and in other works written after 163o, Descartes restricts "imagination's cognitive capabilities to mathematics and physics," but nonetheless imagination "remained at the center of his thought." Finally, Sepper claims that Descartes's psychology was influenced by "a premodern conception of the human soul and its operations" that is now little known (6). The strength of this book is its sweep, the overview that it provides of Descartes's progress and change from his lesser-known early writings to his late, more familiar works. Sepper supports his first claim in the first two parts and his second claim in the final third part of his book. In Part One, Sepper draws upon Descartes's early writings, starting with his CompendiumMusicae and Cogitationesprivatae to support the thesis that Descartes was drawn into philosophic inquiry "in pursuing the question of proportionalities of the senses and other cognitive powers" (41). Sepper contends that the early Descartes was motivated not by his discovery of a method, but rather by the hunch that proportionalities are fundamental to knowing and to the structure of the 468 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY 199 7 cosmos. Sepper, in Part Two, proceeds to a detailed study of Descartes's Regulae ad directionem ingenii to show how this concern with proportionalities is developed into Descartes's mathesisuniversalis and how, in this context, imagination in, for example, the "figuration of extension" plays a fundamental role in the process of acquiring knowledge . Sepper cites the following from Desortes's early Cogitationesprivatae: "As imagination uses figures to conceive bodies, so intellect uses certain sensible bodies to figure spiritual things" (47), along with the the dictum, prevalent among Aristotelians, that all thought is accompanied by a phantasm of imagination, in support of his view that Descartes claims levels of consciousness, what Sepper calls "biplanar" consciousness. He maintains that Descartes is misunderstood because he is viewed as opting for a single plane of consciousness, e.g., intellection alone. Instead, Sepper argues, Descartes sees, for example, intellection as accompanied, assisted, and, what's more, informed and shielded from error, by images or figures. Sepper's perspective is interesting, and it is well worth considering, but some might find it not fully convincing. In the last part of the book, Sepper explores various roles of imagination in Descartes...

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