The Return of Campanella: La Forge versus Cureau de la Chambre

Abstract

In his Traite de l’esprit de l’homme, Louis de La Forge argues that everything that can be observed in a living body can be explained without resorting to any form of knowledge. La Forge’s target, never explicitly mentioned, is Marin Cureau de La Chambre, who in his work as a whole had developed the thesis that animals act through the presence of a form of knowledge that is different from that of the intellect and that can be attributed to the body. In claiming the necessity of a form of knowledge in organic events, Cureau was answering to a problem raised by Campanella in his De sensu rerum. La Forge’s contention that no knowledge is required to explain nature is addressed against the permanence of Renaissance vitalism in the name of the original inspiration of Cartesian new science.