Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 675 ultimate acceptance of his conclusion. Rather his mind is made up when he begins writing; his thesis is clear, and he uses every device of persuasive argumentation to marshall evidence in its support. Facts are there in abundance, but Westfall is not afraid to use innuendo, suggestion, and rhetorical questions to make his point. His previous excursion into Galileo studies (Isis 76 [1985]: 11-3o) shows how effective that technique can be: it was awarded a prize by the History of Science Society, even though based on a dubious interpretation of Castelli's letter to Galileo about observations of Venus that would be rejected by most Galileo specialists. Just as patronage figured in that essay, so it figures in these. The problem comes when Westfall tries to connect this theme with the Jesuits and their opposition to the Copernican system. Though politically powerful within the Church, politics for them was never an end in itself; their mission was to defend the truth of the Catholic faith, and mainly to employ the resources of reason when doing so, although like everyone they had their human failings. Whatever hindsight might show us to be the true system of the world, the fact of the matter is that Galileo's arguments were not convincing by the standards of his day or of our own. Bellarmine had made a legitimate demand of him and he proved simply unable to meet it. That surely does not offer grounds for characterizing Bellarmine as a divinely inspired zealot. The picture Westfall paints of Bellarmine unfortunately has more of Calvin in it than it has of Aquinas. The latter understood well the relationships that hold between faith and reason, and there is no evidence whatever that Bellarmine failed to comprehend his teachings. Yet, throughout the essays, Westfall does give us a good externalist view of seventeenth-century science, and in this he has much in common with Redondi. My own methodological preference is for internalist history. Pursuing in detail the relationships between Galileo's logica docens, which he appropriated from the Jesuits, and the logica utens he employed throughout his scientific career, I see the problem of patronage in a very different light. Galileo benefited enormously from his initial contacts with Clavius and the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano, and however badly his contacts with the Society of Jesus later fared, he still remained greatly in its debt. But that is a quite different story from the one Westfall has set out to tell. WILLIAM A. WALLACE The Catholic University of America Dalia Judovitz. Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity. Cambridge Studies in French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 231. NP. In this critique of Descartes in the context of literary and rhetorical inquiry, Dalia Judovitz contends that there is a "necessary dialogue between philosophy and literature in the Cartesian text.., literary and rhetorical devices mediate and become constitutive of the philosophical articulation of the subject in Descartes .... Descartes's overt rejection of deception, which he equates with false resemblances, is here contradicted by his actual use of the hyperbole and the double (evil genius) to constitute the metaphysical foundations of his system" (154). Judovitz bases her study on "Foucault's notion of 676 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PltILOSOPHY 29:4 OCTOBER 1991 epistemic rupture elaborated in Les Mots el les choses [to] propose an alternate model to explain the shift from . . . the age of resemblance to the age of representation" (141). Prior to Descartes, representation was hy way of figures and allegories that represent objects by resembling them. These representations often are hyperbolic exaggerations or doubles of their objects, are always grasped sensibly, depend on memory, and provide more or less than required for exact representation of their objects. Montaigne thus accepted the inadequacy of all representations. Descartes provides a new mode of symbolic representation based not on resemblance and memory but on characterizing objects in terms of mathematical order and measurement that can be comprehended intuitively. The subject humanly accessible to Montaigne thus becomes merely an impersonal, |ormal point of view. This "subject [is] always present in discourse, but merely as an abstraction and not as an...