A Contextualist History of Cartesian Philosophy: Roger Ariew’s Descartes and the First Cartesians

摘要

By way of conclusion, I would like to come back to what I’ve called Ariew’s“contextualist historical method,” which is what most clearly marks off hisstudy from most current scholarship on Descartes. In the preface to his 1913Index scolastico-cartesien, Etienne Gilson notes that he did not want to write abook on “Descartes and the Scholastics” because such an undertaking“would necessarily be unilateral and be more likely to hide historical truththan to discover it” (Gilson 1913, p. ii). In criticizing the very idea of a univocaldefinition of “Scholasticism’s influence on Descartes,” which wouldhave to rely on discovering sources effectively exercising such an influence,he presents his Index instead as a tool for exploring the “possible influences”of Scholasticism on Cartesianism.Starting with the publication of Descartes and the Last Scholastics, Ariewhas opposed Gilson’s methodology. Acknowledging the central role theIndex scolastico-cartesien played in renewing Descartes studies, the 1999 volumenonetheless signaled that the work of Gilson had exhausted its function.If on the one hand it had the merit of opening up a new field ofhistorical and exegetical study, it on the other hand surreptitiously overemphasizedthe importance of Thomist sources and acknowledged Scotistinfluences only in Descartes’ definition of the idea. Ariew provided a historicalreconstruction that took into account the criticisms developed byDalbiez, who had been the first to recognize the shortcomings of Gilson’sapproach in a 1929 article (Ariew 1999, pp. 41–5, 56–7).Fifteen years later, the spread of Scotism and its importance for Descartesstudies are recognized in the literature as well-established facts. In Descartesand the First Cartesians, the question of Gilson’s influence is definitely settled.No need, then, to criticize Gilson, to rekindle the debate, nor even to citethe Index. The matter is nonetheless not abandoned completely, nor hasresearch on the question stopped evolving. Recent work views the earlytwentieth century neo-Thomist current of thought, of which the Index isa prominent example, from a new angle. When in the first chapter, Ariewdraws on Goudin’s twenty-four Thomist theses as a basis for “measuring” athesis’s degree of Thomism or Scotism, he assigns much importance to atext that, even if it dates from the seventeenth century, was not granted thestatus of an official statement of Thomism until the early twentieth century.