L'Empreinte cartésienne: L'interaction psychophysique, débats classiques et contemporains by Sandrine Roux (review)

Sandrine Roux's L'Empreinte cartésienne addresses what she describes as one of the "persistent problems" in philosophy, namely, the mind-body problem raised by Descartes's substance dualism (17). Her book carefully lays out the various puzzles, both real and perceived, raised by Descartes's theory of humans as a mind-body union. She distinguishes clearly between the way these problems are understood by Descartes, and the way they were seen by some of his seventeenth-century followers, especially the occasionalists, Louis de La Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, and Malebranche. And she tries to orient the Cartesian mind-body problem with respect to theories in contemporary philosophy of mind.

The first two parts are primarily historical in focus (though they also make use of contemporary analytic philosophy to clarify the issues and arguments discussed). In the first part, Roux presents Descartes's views regarding mind-body interaction and the mind-body union, and uses Jaegwon Kim's "pairing problem" objection to Cartesian dualism to clarify the issues raised by Descartes's position. Roux goes on to contrast Descartes's response to these issues with the perspective of the Cartesian occasionalists, La Forge and Cordemoy. Roux's analysis of their arguments does well to highlight the importance of the claim, found in both authors, that causal interaction between two bodies is no more conceivable than causal interaction between a mind and a body.

The second part focuses on problems for Descartes having to do with our knowledge or experience of the mind-body union. Roux presents an objection put to Descartes by Arnauld, based on the observation that we do not have knowledge of the physiological processes inside our body when we engage in voluntary motion. Following Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine, Roux labels this the "defect of knowledge" problem (159). Roux links this problem with the "Quod nescis" argument for occasionalism, found in Cordemoy and Malebranche. Roux analyzes Malebranche's version of this argument in terms of a distinction—developed in papers from the 1960s by Arthur Danto, and in Alvin Goldman's A Theory of Human Action (1970)—between "basic" and "non-basic" actions. She then draws on Danto, Goldman, and Donald Davidson to consider possible responses to Malebranche's reasoning. This leads to an especially interesting discussion of what Roux takes to be a crucial difference between Malebranche's conception of the mind-body union and that of Descartes: While Malebranche and other Cartesians think the mind-body union is grounded in causal relations between the mind and body, Roux argues that Descartes takes the mind-body union to be metaphysically primitive.

Roux's interpretation is (I think) plausible as a reading of Descartes. It is also of particular interest with reference to Kim's pairing problem. Roux turns to this problem in the third part, which concerns contemporary philosophy of mind. (In addition to responding to Kim, Roux discusses, among others, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Frank Jackson, Joseph Levine, and Robert Stalnaker.) She develops a "Cartesian response" to Kim's argument that Cartesian souls cannot act in the physical world (290). Building on Descartes's account of the primitive notion of the mind-body union and his analogy of a sailor in a ship, Roux argues that a Cartesian mind can be paired with a body on the basis of sensation. Roux makes a compelling case that (on her interpretation) Descartes has the resources to reply to Kim's argument.

One way we might take this is to say that Kim's criticisms of the position he labels "Cartesian dualism" miss their mark. Kim presents the pairing problem as a clarification of the historical mind-body problem in Descartes. But if Roux is correct, then the position that Kim attacks is not Descartes's view, but rather a view found in later Cartesians (who themselves reject mind-body causal interaction). However, this seems to undermine...