Physiologia

Dennis Des Chene is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in Saint Louis.

This rangy and precise book deserves to be read even by those historians who think they are bored with Descartes. While offering surprising and detailed readings of bewildering texts like the Description of the Human Body, Des Chene constructs a powerful, sad narrative of the Cartesian disenchantment of the body. Along the way he also delivers provocative views on topics as various as teleology, the role of illustrations in the history of mechanism, theories of the sexual differentiation of the foetus, and problems of simulation in scientific method.- Paula Gould Chester (British Journal for the History of Science) A very impressive body of research.... Des Chene provides much thought-provoking discussion.... For the growing number of scholars with a serious interest in late scholasticism and its relationship to early modern philosophy, the book should be very stimulating and a rich source of information.(Philosophical Review) Des Chene successfully shows that these philosophers were fully aware of the problems in Aristotle's notion of the soul. He also shows that the questions fundamental to the Aristotelian psychology were not so much answered by Descartes and his followers as mooted.- Peter Lautner (Bryn Mawr Review)