Was René Descartes a Voluntarist?

PEDRO IGNACIO URTUBEY

La Plata

Simposio; XII° Jornadas de Investigación en Filosofía; 2019

Departamento de Filosodía, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de La Plata

For several decades of the last century, many historians (M. B. Foster (1934); J. E. McGuire (1972); Francis Oakley (1961); John Henry (1990); P. M. Heinmann (1978); Margaret Osler (1991); Antoni Malet (1997)) held a thesis that was later known as the "thesis of voluntarism and experimental science. Basically, this thesis is articulated as follows: the most representative philosophers of theological voluntarism understand that God created the world by an act of mere will, that is, without being constrained by eternal and necessary principles. This voluntarist position would determine the conception that the natural world is a contingent reality. At the same time, since the contingent is only cognizable through experience, this has the consequence that naturecan only be understood a posteriori, through a cautious examination of the phenomenabased on an experimentalist epistemology (Foster 1934; Henry 2009). In sum, this thesisassumes that theological voluntarism involves an experimental epistemology.Peter Harrison (2002, p. 63) has questioned the inexorable logic of that thesis,stating that there were voluntarists who were not experimentalists. The paradigmatic casethat Harrison emphasizes is that of René Descartes, for whom experimentalism would notbe essential, since God, having created eternal truths by an act of mere will (theologicalvoluntarism), then proceeded to record them in the human mind: Thus, we could know thelaws of nature without resorting to experimental research, because those truths arerecorded in our minds (Harrison 2002, p.66).Harrison´s proposal to abandon the thesis of voluntarism and experimental sciencehas been discussed by John Henry (2009). Indeed, Henry argues that it is not possible toarrive at a conclusive characterization of Descartes as ?voluntarist?, since although thereare passages that account for a Cartesian voluntarism, it is no less true that Cartesian Physics are founded on an intellectualist perspective: it is possible to arrive at theknowledge of the world through a process of pure reasoning since God cannot change theeternal laws that he has created.Our position is that Descartes cannot be definitively pigeonholed in one of thecategories of the voluntarism-intellectualism polarity. In this we agree with John Henry. Onthe other hand, following Harrison, we understand that in Descartes there are voluntaristpassages that influence Cartesian science. In what follows we will analyze the analogy ofthe human body with a string from the sixth Meditation. We will try to focus on thevoluntarist perspective that nurtures this analogy, in order to enrich the Harrison-Henrycontroversy regarding the thesis of voluntarism and experimental science.