Les Chemins cartésiens du jugement. By Élodie Cassan.

Abstract

Élodie Cassan’s acute and learned study challenges a widespread interpretation of early modern philosophy, according to which logic was displaced by or reduced to psychology, on account of Descartes’s nefarious grounding of knowledge in subjectivity. Her focus is on Descartes’s conception of judgement, as aimed both to construct and to conceptualize scientific reasoning. It thus performs a logical function in that its aim is to enable us to avoid error in whatever domain of knowledge we are engaged in. Taking scientific knowledge to be an articulated body of true judgements, Descartes’s concern is with ascertaining the truth of these judgements. An illuminating contextual chapter helps to make sense of his well-known rejection of syllogistic logic, as being incapable of showing us how to produce judgements that are actually true. She reconstructs the approach to logic he would have encountered at La Flèche, and then explores the handling of the concept in Ramus, Bacon, and Montaigne. In Chapter 2 Cassan carefully examines Descartes’s initial doctrine of judgement. In the Regulae , he rejects the standard equation of judgement and proposition, offering an understanding of judgement as involving a legitimate assent to a mental content validated by the mind. Endorsing Aquinas, to the extent that at this stage he makes judgement an operation of the understanding, he nonetheless departs from him when he includes both intuition and deduction within its scope. Both these operations are crucial to the construction of a model of independent truth-seeking emancipated from prior authority. In the Discourse he highlights the obstacles to this independence, especially intellectual preconceptions received unquestioningly from one’s teachers, often in conflict with one’s appetites. Part of the remedy he advocates for this consists in a systematic detachment of oneself from one’s sensations, which enables the suspension of judgement put into practice in the First Meditation. In the Meditations he develops his later doctrine, that judgement is an operation not of the intellect, but of the will; this doctrine protects him, Cassan argues, against the criticism that the key concepts of clarity and distinctness are to be understood in psychological, and hence subjective, terms. (It might have been interesting to pursue this point in relation to the Fifth and Seventh Objections.) The resolution not to pass judgement on things the truth of which is not clearly conceived provides a non-subjective norm of rationality. The chapter concludes with a tantalizingly brief discussion of the vexed question of the divine guarantee in relation to memory. Chapter 3 explores the application of this conception of judgement in the fields of natural philosophy and ethics, and Chapter 4 traces its reception in the Port-Royal Logique and the work of Malebranche. Throughout, Cassan offers helpful commentary on previous critical approaches — one of the many virtues of this valuable reconsideration of a key Cartesian concept, and its role in his overall method for the construction of knowledge.