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Descartes's Peepshow
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Footnotes
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This Critical Notice was invited and undertaken before its author became a member of the CJP editorial board.
1
I owe thanks to a number of people who (willingly or not) contributed to my thinking about this notice: they include Lilli Alanen, Deborah Brown herself, Ronnie de Sousa, Alan Gabbey, André Gombay, Sean Greenberg, John Marshall, Alexander Nehamas, and Barbara S. Schmitter. I would also like to express thanks to an anonymous referee, whose skepticism is most appreciated, even if I don't overcome it. Most of all, I am grateful to my research assistants: Bart Lenart, and Jaclyn Rohel, who did much of the background research. Work on this essay was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by a sabbatical leave from the University of Alberta, which transformed itself into a medical leave. I am extremely thankful for the care and consideration shown by the department and university during that time.
References
2 Consider some examples separated only by a generation or two: the ferocious antagonism of mid-seventeenth century Dutch authorities, Shaftesbury's dismissal of Descartes's account of the passions in ‘Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,’ in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Klein, L. ED. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), 131,Google Scholar and the 18th century anti-materialists who assimilated Descartes to La Mettrie, see Gaukroger, S. Descartes: an Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), 1.Google Scholar
3 For the sake of full disclosure, I should mention that I was one of the referees for the original manuscript of the book. Few exercises kill off the pleasure of reading more than refereeing. So, I consider it a testament to the work that I reached the end still liking it.
4 So I argue in ‘How to Engineer a Human Being: Passions and Functional Explanation in Descartes,’ A Companion to Descartes, J. Broughton & J. Carriero, eds. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing 2007), 426-44. For alternative readings, see, e.g., Lisa Shapiro, ‘What are the Passions Doing in the Meditations?’ and Beardsley, Bill ‘Love in the Ruins: Passion in Descartes’ Meditations,’ Persons and Passions: Essays in Honor of Annette Baier, Whiting, J. Williams, C. and Jenkins, J. eds. (Notre Dame: U. Notre Dame Press 2005), 14–33, 34-47.Google Scholar
5 For the complete correspondence, see Shapiro, Lisa The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes (Chicago: Chicago U. Press 2007).Google Scholar
6 I call this ‘presentational’ in contrast to Margaret Wilson's well-known distinction between a sensation's ‘presentational’ and ‘referential’ contents. See Wilson, ‘Descartes on the Representationality of Sensation,’ Ideas and Mechanism (Princeton: Princeton U. Press 1999), 73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 In much clumsier fashion, I argued for something similar in ‘Representation, Self-Representation and the Passions in Descartes,’ Review of Metaphysics 48 (1994) 331-57.
8 Brown tries to ward off this possibility by emphasizing that the modal distinction does not constitute a definition of modes. But her gloss faces an obstacle in the Principles’ contention that ‘the distinction by which the mode of one substance is distinct from another substance or from the mode of another substance’ should be called ‘a real distinction, rather than a modal distinction’ (AT VIII 30, CSM I 214). Still, note that Descartes sometimes asserts sameness without implying numerical identity, e.g., ‘the idea of the sun is the sun itself’ [sit sol ipse] (AT VII 102, CSM II 75). All citations to Descartes are given parenthetically by volume and page number to Ch.Adam and P. Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin 1996), followed by volume and page of the translations of Cottingham, J. Stoothoff, R. Murdoch, D. trans., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press 1984-91).Google Scholar
9 ‘Cartesian Passions and the Union of Mind and Body,’ Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, A. Rorty, ed. (Berkeley & Los Aangeles: University of California Press 1986), 513f.
10 I owe the example and the notion of appropriate extending of a metaphor to Lynne Tirrell; see, e.g., ‘Extending: The Structure of Metaphor,’ Noûs 23 (1989) 17-34.
11 See John, Cottingham ‘Descartes, René,’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Audi, R. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press 1999), 225.Google Scholar This is an abbreviated survey article, but it has far-flung influence; see, e.g., Irving, Allan ‘Waiting for Foucault: Social Work and the Multitudinous Truth(s) of Life,’ in Reading Foucault for Social Work, Chambon, A. Irving, A. and Epstein, L. eds. (New York: Columbia U. Press 1999), 31.Google Scholar
12 For a broad account of the problems and prospects of network analysis, see Emirbayer, Mustafa and Goodwin, Jeff The American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994) 1411–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For some caveats about distinguishing herd behavior and the mere imitation of strict informational cascades, see Çelen, Bogaçhan and Kariv, Shachar ‘Distinguishing Informational Cascades from Herd Behavior in the Laboratory,’ The American Economic Review 94 (2004) 484–498.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For how networks of citations can disseminate belief, a problem similar to that under consideration above, see Steven A., Greenberg ‘How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network,’ British Medical Journal 339 (2009)Google Scholar, <http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj.b2680>.
13 See Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, Ivo Welch, ‘Informational Cascades and Rational Herding: An Annotated Bibliography,’ Working Paper: UCLA/ Anderson and Ohio State University and Yale/SOM, June 1996. <http://www.info-cascades.info>.
14 See S. Bikhchandani, D. Hirshleifer, I. Welch, ‘A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades,’ Journal of Political Economy 100 (1992) 994.
15 See ibid., 999-1002 for the details of the probability calculus.
16 Ibid., 994
17 Ibid., 994. Note that blind refereeing would prevent the cascade by blocking channels of transmission.
18 Ibid., 1014
19 Ibid., 998. The website (1996) adds ‘it is easy to construct examples in which everyone is wrong with 30-40% probability.’
20 Note that BHW specifically count ‘communication’ as an alternate mechanism to cascades, (1992), 993, for it provides a way to aggregate information, ibid., 1015.
21 See ibid., 1012, for an example of adopting a physical theory. Such cases would seem common, particularly since many contemporary physical theories and mathematical proofs are just too complicated for any one individual to master.
22 BHW argue that they are particularly susceptible to multiple public disclosures of information, ibid., 1007.
23 Ibid., 993
24 Robert J. Gatchel, ‘Perspectives on Pain: A Historical Overview,’ in Psychosocial Factors in Pain: Critical Perspectives, R. Gatchel and D. Turk, eds. (New York: Guilford Press 1999), 5.
25 Ibid., 5
26 Ibid., 6
27 Jaclyn Rohel efficiently charted the main routes of citation for me, although the task was complicated by the failure of some authors to cite any sources. But one seems to be a real touchstone: Melzack, R. and Wall, P. ‘Pain Mechanisms: A New Theory,’ Science 150 (1965) 971–79,CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed which introduces Descartes on 972, and then extends the analogy on 976. Melzack and Wall seem the main conduit through which reception has passed, but the analogy may derive from yet earlier sources, particularly Foster's, M. translation of ‘L'Homme’ in Lectures on the History of Physiology during the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1901).Google Scholar
28 Consciousness Explained (Boston; Little, Brown 1991), 17. Note that the ‘traditional’ view need not be dualist, ibid., 257.
29 It can be found even in authors sharing few of Dennett's concerns. For instance, Andrea Nye (mis)reads Descartes's several allusions to how passions are incited by stage performances in its light: e.g., ‘From the standpoint of reason, maintained Descartes, one can observe tragic events as if at the theater’ (Feminism and Modern Philosophy [New York: Routledge 2004], 46. Cf. AT XI 470, CSM I 395).
30 See. e.g., Beecher, Donald ‘Mind, Theaters, and the Anatomy of Consciousness,’ Philosophy and Literature 30 (2006) 1–16,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 5-6, which remarks on how the theatrical model suits Descartes's conception of the mind as ‘its own private, representational space,’ although in fact, Descartes makes no mention of theatrical models.