Companion to Descartes

Janet Broughton is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Descartes's Method of Doubt(2002). John Carriero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published widely in early modern philosophy.

"Good companions fulfil two more duties - they provide better ways of understanding the familiar and they also defamiliarise it by encouraging new slants and alerting us to relatively ignored issues: this companion does both.... A most attractive and wide-ranging addition to its field." (Reference Reviews, Issue 6 2008)

• Notes on Contributors xList of Abbreviations xivIntroduction xvPart I The Intellectual Context 11 Life and Works 3Stephen Gaukroger2 Aristotelian Natural Philosophy: Body, Cause, Nature 17Dennis Des Chene3 Descartes and Augustine 33Catherine Wilson4 Descartes and the Legacy of Ancient Skepticism 52Casey PerinPart II Mathematics and Natural Philosophy 675 Descartes and Galileo: Copernicanism and the Metaphysical Foundations of Physics 69Michael Friedman6 Explanation as Confirmation in Descartes’s Natural Philosophy 84Ernan Mcmullin7 Descartes and Mathematics 103Paolo Mancosu8 Descartes’s Optics: Light, the Eye, and Visual Perception 124Margaret J. OslerPart III Epistemology and Metaphysics 1439 Descartes’s Method 145Murray Miles10 Descartes’s Use of Doubt 164David Owens11 Self-Knowledge 179Janet Broughton12 Descartes on True and False Ideas 196Deborah J. Brown13 Clear and Distinct Perception 216Sarah Patterson14 Causation Without Intelligibility and Causation Without God in Descartes 235Michael Della Rocca15 Descartes on Substance 251Vere Chappell16 Descartes and the Metaphysics of Extension 271C. G. Normore17 The Role of God in Descartes’s Philosophy 288John Cottingham18 The Cartesian Circle and the Foundations of Knowledge 302John Carriero19 Cartesian Innateness 319Alan Nelson20 Descartes on the Will in Judgment 334Lex Newman21 Omnipotence, Modality, and Conceivability 353Lilli Alanen22 Descartes’s Dualism 372Marleen Rozemond23 The Union and Interaction of Mind and Body 390Paul Hoffman24 Animals 404Gary Hatfield25 How to Engineer a Human Being: Passions and Functional Explanation in Descartes 426Amy M. Schmitter26 Descartes’s Ethics 445Lisa ShapiroPart IV Descartes’s Legacy 46527 Descartes’s Legacy in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Polemic 467Thomas M. Lennon28 Contemporary Reactions to Descartes’s Philosophy of Mind 482Quassim Cassam29 Descartes and the Phenomenological Tradition 496Wayne M. Martin30 Our Debt to Descartes 513Barry StroudIndex 526