Descartes and the First Cartesians by Roger Ariew (review)

Roger Ariew sets out, very successfully, to do three things: to examine Descartes's attempt to write a textbook, the Principia philosophiae, that could replace those used in the schools; to explain why, by the standards of the day, Descartes failed; and to survey the major attempts by Descartes's early followers to write their own, more successful textbooks. His work is part of the broader push to understand Descartes as a full participant in seventeenth-century intellectual culture, rather than as a solitary. Appreciating Descartes's educational project, Ariew argues, is crucial for this new understanding, for this project informs much of Descartes's engagement with Aristotelian institutions and texts, and shapes his own work and that of his followers. Chapter 1 focuses on the institutional background. It gives a helpful introduction to the major groups then teaching philosophy in France — the Jesuits and the Oratorians — and Descartes's relationship with them. Chapter 2 surveys the structure and content of late scholastic textbooks. The central texts here are the Conimbricenses and Eustachius's Summa. The third chapter discusses Descartes's own views, and the sorts of problems these set his followers. The main question is: were Descartes's views in each of the four areas substantive and coherent enough to base a full textbook on? As Ariew recognizes, these topics have already been well covered for physics and metaphysics; his sections on Descartes's logic and ethics are much fresher. Descartes's treatment of these is famously brief. It is illuminating to see how this poses problems for the Cartesian educational project that continued into the eighteenth century: with so little to go on, the work of elucidating (or inventing) a Cartesian logic and ethics fell disproportionately to his followers. The fourth chapter looks at how these early Cartesians — Arnauld, Desgabets, Régis, and Spinoza, among others — in fact constructed their textbooks. In logic, they typically moderated Descartes's negativity in order to produce something more acceptable to the schools. In metaphysics, too, the structure of Descartes's thought was often rejigged to conform more closely to scholastic models. In physics, they tended to be more empiricist than Descartes himself was. In ethics, finally, Descartes's scattered remarks gave them very nearly free rein. Ariew's brief conclusion emphasizes that the early Cartesians ultimately succeeded in bringing off Descartes's educational project (in spite of Descartes, sometimes): the system they developed across their textbooks indeed supplanted Aristotelianism and, into the nineteenth century, stood as the chief alternative to Newtonianism in France. The book should be of value to historians of ideas interested in the textual and institutional dynamics by which new philosophy was received in early modern Europe. A single reservation concerns the rather odd balance in the book's organization. The first two chapters, which effectively set the stage for what is to come, take up slightly more than half the length of the main text. An extension of Chapters 3 or 4 — perhaps, to mirror Chapter 1, a with references to contemporary sources; exhaustivity is of course impossible in this format. The volume's second part contains Sainte-Marthe's publications from 1582 to 1587, including several occasional poems such as those that appear in the Christophori Thuani Tumulus, the Tombeau de Monsieur Rouxel, and the Tombeau de Pierre de Ronsard. In the volume's third and final section, Brunel presents the reader with Sainte-Marthe's monumental 1587 Poemata, with a lengthy Introduction. Seiziémistes (and especially the neo-Latinists among them) may now read the major poetic works of Scévole de Sainte-Marthe in Brunel's excellent modern edition.