Elisabeth of Bohemia as a Naturalistic Dualist

June 3, 2017 | Autor: F. Janssen-Lauret | Categoria: Ontology, Naturalism, Descartes, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia
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ELISABETH OF BOHEMIA AS A NATURALISTIC DUALIST FREDERIQUE JANSSEN-LAURET, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

Paper for collection Early Modern Women on Science and Philosophy (ed. E. Thomas), Cambridge University Press, under contract. Available at https://www.academia.edu/ 25834641/Elisabeth_of_Bohemia_as_a_Naturalistic_Dualist Elisabeth’s Concerns About Mind-Body Interaction. ‘I ask you please to tell me how the soul of a human being (it being only a thinking substance) can determine the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions. For it seems that all determination of movement happens though the impulsion of the thing moved, by the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else by the particular qualities and shape of the surface of the latter. Physical contact is required for the first two conditions, extension for the third. You entirely exclude the one [extension] from the notion you have of the soul, and the other [physical contact] appears to me incompatible with an immaterial thing. This is why I ask you for a more precise definition . . . of its substance separate from its action, that is, of thought’ [7] ‘I admit that it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede the capacity to move a body and be moved by it to an immaterial thing. For, if the first is achieved through information, it would be necessary that the spirits, which cause the movements, were intelligent, a capacity you accord to nothing corporeal. And even though, in your Metaphysical Meditations, you show the possibility of the second, it is altogether very difficult to understand that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and the custom of reasoning well, can lose all of this by some vapours, and that, being able to subsist without the body, and having nothing in common with it, the soul is still so governed by it.’ [5] Descartes appears to have interpreted her view as a confused version of his own, advising her to ‘freely attribute this matter and this extension to the soul; for that is nothing but to conceive it united to the body’ [1]. Contemporary commentators have hailed Elisabeth instead as a materialist [8, pp. 413]. I want to present a different reading of Elisabeth, on which she was primarily interested in promoting empirical investigation of the mind as well as the body. Elisabeth was first and foremost a kind of naturalist, rejecting the old Aristotelian paradigms. She preferred Descartes’ view to that of his materialist opponents, but thought the matter should be decided based on further research into the properties of the soul. Against the Materialist Interpretation. It is fairly easy to see how to read the excerpts above in a materialistic way, and this is a common reading of Elisabeth’s objections, but there are some difficulties with it. First of all, Elisabeth stated clearly that ‘extension is 1

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FREDERIQUE JANSSEN-LAURET, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

not necessary to thought’ [4]. Secondly, she appears to suggest that thought is compatible with physical motion, but a completely different function from it, so certainly not reducible to physical motion or contact [4]. In 1643, Elisabeth had not read the Objections to the Meditations. If she were a materialist, we would expect her to approve of the materialist objections of Hobbes and Gassendi. But, upon reading them, Elisabeth wrote ‘M. Gassendi, who has such a reputation for knowledge, made, after the Englishman, the least reasonable objections at all’ [6]. An Alternative Interpretation: Naturalistic Dualism. On my reading, Elisabeth, a keen scholar of mechanistic physics, objected not to substance dualism per se but to the residual Scholasticism of Descartes’ account of mind-body causality [5] and his dogmatism about principal attributes. Elisabeth was concerned to replace the old Scholastic and teleological ways with modern empirical science and philosophy. She was concerned to defend a mechanistic account of bodily motion against the Scholastic doctrine of information, and firmly rejected Descartes’ attempts to get her to understand mind-body causation in Scholastic terms [5]. She conceded that ‘the senses show me that the soul moves the body’ but ‘they teach me nothing . . . of the way in which it does so’, asking for a more mechanistic or scientific account. The aspect of Cartesian metaphysics that Elisabeth was most opposed to, on my interpretation, is not that the mind or soul is a separate substance from the body, but that each substance has exactly one principal attributes to which all its modes belong, which is simply residual Scholasticism for which there is no independent evidence. Descartes miscategorises the ‘action’ [7] of thought as an attribute, and identifies this without good reason with the merely negative, uninformative property of immateriality [5]. In her view, we do not yet know what this principal attribute of mental substance is, and this should be a matter for empirical investigation; we may find that its real principal attribute is compatible with that of extension, too [4]. This means Elisabeth can be read as a forerunner of contemporary naturalistic dualism which proposes substance dualism as a best interpretation of the difference in logical form between physics and current psychology [2]. References [1] Ren´e Descartes. Letter to Elisabeth, 28 June 1643. In Lisa Shapiro, editor, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Ren´e Descartes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. [2] Frederique Janssen-Lauret. Logical form, the first person, and naturalism about psychology: The case against physicalist imperialism. In M. Fernandez Pinto, U. Maki, and A. Walsh, editors, Scientific Imperialism. volume in preparation. [3] Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Renee Bleau. The Indispensable Self: Non-Physical Entities in Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, under contract. [4] Elisabeth of Bohemia. Letter to Descartes, 1 July 1643. In Lisa Shapiro, editor, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Ren´e Descartes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. [5] Elisabeth of Bohemia. Letter to Descartes, 10 June 1643. In Lisa Shapiro, editor, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Ren´e Descartes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. [6] Elisabeth of Bohemia. Letter to Descartes, 5 December 1647. In Lisa Shapiro, editor, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Ren´e Descartes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007.

ELISABETH OF BOHEMIA AS A NATURALISTIC DUALIST

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[7] Elisabeth of Bohemia. Letter to Descartes, 6 May 1643. In Lisa Shapiro, editor, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Ren´e Descartes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. [8] Lisa Shapiro. Volume editor’s introduction. In Lisa Shapiro, editor, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Ren´e Descartes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007.

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