René Descartes's Natural Philosophy and Particular Bodies

This book explores René Descartes’s attempts to describe particular bodies, such as rocks, minerals, metals, plants, and animals, within the mechanistic interpretation of nature of his philosophical program. Despite his early rationalistic epistemology, Descartes’s increasing attention to collections, histories, lists of qualities, and particular bodies results in a puzzling ‘short history of all natural phenomena’ contained in the Principles of philosophy (1644). The present book outlines ...