A History of Philosophy, Vol. IV: Descartes to Leibniz

Summary

Descartes to Leibniz (1958) is the fourth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy and the first of three he devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Volume V would take the British philosophers from Hobbes to Hume and Volume VI the French and German Enlightenment through Kant, so this book carries an unusually long introduction meant to serve all three. That introduction asks what changed when philosophy became 'modern'. Copleston acknowledges the break that Descartes announced, but he also points to continuities with late scholasticism and the Renaissance, and to the immense prestige of mathematical physics after Galileo. He explains the familiar division of the period into continental rationalists and British empiricists, then qualifies it: the labels mark tendencies, not sealed camps, and the rationalists themselves valued experiment and observation. Descartes receives the fullest treatment. Copleston follows the rules of method in the Discourse, the systematic doubt and the cogito of the Meditations, the proofs of God from the idea of the infinite and from the idea of a perfect being, God's role in guaranteeing clear and distinct ideas, the real distinction of mind and body, and the mechanical physics of extended matter. He notes the difficulties Descartes's contemporaries raised, including the charge of circular reasoning and the puzzle of how an unextended mind can move an extended body. Pascal stands apart as a mathematician who refused to make geometry the model of all knowledge. Copleston presents his contrast between the geometrical mind and the intuitive mind, the reasons of the heart, the wager and the portrait of human greatness and misery as the work of an apologist rather than a system-builder. The Cartesian movement and the occasionalists, among them Geulincx and above all Malebranche, follow, with Malebranche's teaching that God is the only true cause and that we see all things in God. Spinoza is expounded through the geometrical order of the Ethics: one infinite substance, God or Nature, known to us under the attributes of thought and extension; the necessity of all that happens; the analysis of the passions; the three kinds of knowledge; and the intellectual love of God. Copleston adds Spinoza's political writings and weighs the old dispute over whether his system is pantheism, atheism or something harder to name. The volume ends with Leibniz, whose monads, pre-established harmony, principle of sufficient reason and defence of this as the best possible world are read in close connection with his logic. Copleston repeatedly measures each system by how it relates God, the mind and the physical world, and he observes how far all of them still depend on the scholastic vocabulary of substance and cause even while transforming it. The book remains in copyright, so this library offers a description and buying links rather than its text.

Plot or Argument

• What made philosophy modern

  An extended introduction to Volumes IV to VI: the inheritance from scholasticism and the Renaissance, the impact of mathematical science, and the strengths and limits of the rationalist and empiricist labels.

• Descartes: method, doubt and the cogito

  The ideal of a unified science, the rules of method, systematic doubt and the certainty of one's own thinking existence.

• Descartes: God, matter and the union of mind and body

  The proofs of God, the divine guarantee of clear and distinct ideas, extension as the essence of body, mechanistic physics, and the problem of interaction between soul and body.

• Pascal against the geometrical ideal

  Pascal's science, the esprit de géométrie and esprit de finesse, the heart's knowledge of first principles, the wager and his apologetic for Christianity.

• Cartesians and occasionalists

  The spread and modification of Descartes's ideas, Geulincx and occasionalism, and Malebranche on God as sole cause and the vision of all things in God.

• Spinoza's one substance

  The geometrical method of the Ethics, substance, attributes and modes, necessity, the passions and human bondage, the kinds of knowledge, the intellectual love of God, and the political treatises.

• Leibniz's monads and the best world

  Logic and the predicate-in-subject principle, sufficient reason, monads and perception, pre-established harmony, the proofs of God and the theodicy of the best possible world.

Characters

• Frederick Copleston, author and expositor

  Jesuit historian who in this volume turns from the scholastics to the founders of modern philosophy, reading them partly in light of what they inherited from the schools.

• René Descartes, principal subject

  French mathematician and philosopher whose method of doubt and dualism of mind and extended matter set the problems for the whole volume.

• Blaise Pascal, subject

  Mathematician and Jansenist sympathizer whose Pensées challenge the sufficiency of geometrical reason in religion and morals.

• Arnold Geulincx, subject

  Flemish Cartesian whose occasionalism and ethic of humility appear in the chapter on Descartes's followers.

• Nicolas Malebranche, subject

  Oratorian priest who made God the only true cause and held that we see ideas in God.

• Baruch Spinoza, principal subject

  Dutch lens-grinder and philosopher of the one substance, God or Nature, expounded in geometrical order.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, principal subject

  German logician, mathematician and diplomat whose monadology and optimism close the volume.

Lessons

• Doubt as a tool, not a home

  Copleston shows that Descartes doubted methodically in order to reach certainty, not to rest in scepticism, and that the method's success depends on whether the proofs of God hold. Students learn the difference between disciplined questioning and corrosive suspicion, and why a starting point inside the self raises the problem of reaching the world again.

  • Why does Descartes need God to trust even his clear and distinct ideas?
  • Is the charge that Descartes argues in a circle fair, as Copleston states it?
  • When is doubt a virtue in a student, and when does it become a vice?

• The heart has its reasons

  In Copleston's account Pascal accepts mathematical rigour in its own sphere yet denies that it can settle the questions that matter most. Knowledge of first principles, of persons and of God comes through what he calls the heart, a kind of intuitive grasp rather than mere feeling. The chapter teaches students to recognize different kinds of evidence suited to different subjects.

  • What does Pascal mean by the heart, according to Copleston, and how does it differ from emotion?
  • Does the wager ask a person to believe without reasons, or to act on a reasonable bet?
  • Name a subject you study where the geometrical method would be the wrong tool.

• Who really causes things?

  Occasionalism, in Geulincx and Malebranche, arose from a serious problem in Descartes: if mind and matter share nothing, how can either act on the other? Their answer, that God alone acts and creatures only supply occasions, shows how a solution to one puzzle can unsettle ordinary beliefs about responsibility and nature.

  • Why did the Cartesian split between mind and body make occasionalism attractive?
  • If God is the only true cause, in what sense are human beings responsible for what they do?

• Freedom as understanding necessity

  Spinoza denies free will in the ordinary sense and locates human freedom in understanding the necessity of things and loving God intellectually. Copleston expounds this with care before noting how sharply it departs from Christian teaching on creation and personal choice. Students can practise stating a view accurately before saying where and why they disagree.

  • How can Spinoza call a person free if everything happens by necessity?
  • What does Copleston identify as the main obstacles to reading Spinoza's God as the God of Scripture?
  • Does understanding why we feel a passion actually weaken it, as Spinoza claims?

• Is this the best possible world?

  Leibniz argued from God's wisdom and goodness that the actual world, evil included, is the best of the possible worlds. Copleston places this inside Leibniz's logic of sufficient reason and his account of compossible things. The doctrine invites students to think about providence and suffering with more precision than slogans allow.

  • What does Leibniz mean by 'best', and why does he think a world without evil might be worse?
  • How does the principle of sufficient reason lead to optimism in Leibniz's system?

Context

In the 1950s many English-speaking philosophers read Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz mainly for isolated arguments, often through the analytic lens of Russell's book on Leibniz. Copleston wrote for students who needed the systems whole, and as a Catholic historian he paid particular attention to what the rationalists owed to scholastic categories and to their arguments about God.

Composition

Copleston prepared the volume while dividing his teaching between Heythrop College in England and the Gregorian University in Rome. Burns and Oates published it in London in 1958; Image Books issued an American paperback, and Continuum reprinted it in 2003 under the series subtitle The Rationalists.

Reception

The book became one of the most used parts of the series, valued in undergraduate courses on early modern philosophy for its clear reconstruction of the Meditations, the Ethics and the Monadology. Later specialists have gone further on Descartes's science, on Spinoza's Jewish and political context and on Leibniz's unpublished papers, and some have questioned the rationalist and empiricist division that the introduction uses even while qualifying it.

Comparisons

• Discourse on Method

  Copleston's account of the four rules of method and of Descartes's search for a unified science follows the autobiographical sketch Descartes gives in the Discourse.

• Meditations on First Philosophy

  The core Descartes chapters follow the order of the six Meditations, from doubt and the cogito to the proof of the external world.

• Six Metaphysical Meditations, with Hobbes's Objections and the Replies

  The objections of Hobbes and others to the Meditations are the same difficulties Copleston raises about circularity and about how mind and body interact.

• The Passions of the Soul

  Copleston's discussion of mind-body union depends on the physiology of animal spirits and the pineal gland worked out in Descartes's last treatise.

• Pensees

  The Pascal chapter organizes the scattered fragments of the Pensées around the heart, the wager and human misery and greatness.

• Ethics

  Copleston's Spinoza chapters move through the five parts of the Ethics in order, explaining definitions and axioms before the doctrine of the passions.

• A Theologico-Political Treatise

  Spinoza's account of prophecy, Scripture and the free commonwealth, discussed in Copleston's treatment of his politics, is fully argued in this treatise.

• Logical Writings on Binary Arithmetic and Universal Character

  Copleston weighs the reading of Leibniz's metaphysics as an outgrowth of his logic; these writings on a universal characteristic and binary arithmetic show that logical ambition directly.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How the introduction qualifies the rationalist and empiricist labels before using them. Note what Copleston thinks the labels hide.
• The role God plays in each system: guarantor of knowledge for Descartes, sole cause for Malebranche, the one substance for Spinoza, wise chooser of the best world for Leibniz.
• Every attempt to explain how mind and body are connected, from Descartes's interaction to occasionalism, parallelism and pre-established harmony.
• Scholastic terms such as substance, mode, essence and cause, and how each thinker keeps the word but changes its meaning.
• The Pascal chapter as a counterweight. Ask why Copleston places a critic of geometrical reason in the middle of the rationalists.

Key terms and names

Cogito

Descartes's first certainty, 'I think, therefore I am', reached by finding that the act of doubting cannot itself be doubted.

Clear and distinct ideas

Ideas present to an attentive mind and sharply separated from all others, which Descartes holds to be true once God's veracity is established.

Occasionalism

The view of Geulincx and Malebranche that created things are not true causes and that God acts on the occasion of creaturely events.

Deus sive Natura

Spinoza's phrase 'God or Nature', expressing his identification of the one infinite substance with the whole order of nature.

Monad

For Leibniz, a simple, unextended substance with perception and appetite, 'windowless' and coordinated with all others by God.

Pre-established harmony

Leibniz's teaching that God so arranged all monads from the start that their states correspond without any causal influence between them.

Principle of sufficient reason

Leibniz's principle that nothing is or happens without a reason why it is so and not otherwise.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are Descartes's reasons for doubting the senses and even mathematics in the First Meditation, as Copleston reports them?
2. Comprehension How does Malebranche's claim that we see all things in God answer a difficulty in Descartes?
3. Interpretation Why does Copleston think Spinoza's geometrical method is more than a style of presentation?
4. Interpretation How does Leibniz's theory that every predicate is contained in its subject threaten human freedom, and how does he try to save it?
5. Interpretation In what sense is Pascal's wager addressed to someone who already finds reason unable to decide?
6. Big Question Can a philosophy that begins inside one's own mind ever reach a world of other persons and things?
7. Big Question Is it more reverent to make God the only cause of everything, or to grant creatures real powers of their own?

Faith Connections

• 1 Corinthians 1:20–25 (Scripture)

  Paul's contrast between the wisdom of the world and the foolishness of the cross lies behind Pascal's distinction, discussed by Copleston, between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

• Acts 17:28 (Scripture)

  'In him we live, and move, and have our being' can be read in Malebranche's sense of dependence on God or pressed toward Spinoza's single substance; comparing the two shows why creation from nothing matters to the distinction.

• Augustine, Confessions and On the Free Choice of the Will (Great Conversation)

  Arnauld, in the Fourth Objections to the Meditations, compared Descartes's 'I think' to Augustine's argument that one who is deceived must exist; reading the two side by side shows how differently they used the same insight.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Copleston presents the rationalists as ambitious builders who tried to derive a complete account of God, mind and world from clear first principles on the model of mathematics, and shows how each system's treatment of substance and causation generated the problems that the next thinker tried to solve.

Rhetorical device: genealogy of a problem. The mind-body question is traced from Descartes's interaction through the occasionalists and Spinoza's parallel attributes to Leibniz's pre-established harmony, so that each solution appears as a response to its predecessor.

Debate: Resolved: Descartes's method of doubt did more good than harm to the pursuit of truth.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain, with Copleston as your guide, why Descartes needed to prove God's existence before he could trust his knowledge of the physical world, and assess whether the order of his argument works.

Comparison with Meditations on First Philosophy: Read the Third Meditation and Copleston's account of Descartes's proofs of God. Where does the historian make the argument easier to follow, and what in Descartes's own voice is lost in the summary?

Medical Lens

The volume is a standard map of the seventeenth-century debates from which modern talk of mind and brain descends. Descartes's mechanical physiology and his account of the passions, Spinoza's treatment of the emotions as confused ideas that understanding can master, and Leibniz's unnoticed 'little perceptions' are each expounded. A reader in psychiatry or the history of medicine can use the relevant chapters as a reliable orientation before turning to the primary texts; Copleston himself writes as a philosopher, not a historian of medicine, and the physiology is background rather than his focus.

• Descartes chapters, on the relation of mind and body

  Copleston's exposition of the real distinction between thinking and extended substance, the interaction of soul and body through the pineal gland and animal spirits, and the difficulties critics raised.

  Mind Body
• Spinoza chapters, on the passions and human bondage

  Exposition of Spinoza's analysis of the emotions and his claim that forming a clear idea of a passion lessens its power, an early rational therapy of the affects.

  Philosophy AS Therapy Mind Body
• Leibniz chapters, on perception and apperception

  Account of Leibniz's distinction between perception and conscious apperception and of perceptions too small to be noticed, often cited as an early recognition of unconscious mental life.

  Psychology Unconscious
• Chapter on Cartesianism and Malebranche

  Occasionalist replies to the problem of mind-body interaction, in which God produces bodily motions on the occasion of volitions and sensations on the occasion of bodily changes.

  Mind Body

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation in a Paris salon around 1660 between Pascal and a confident young Cartesian on whether geometry can prove anything about God. Use the distinctions Copleston draws in his Pascal chapter.

• Classroom

  Give each group one of the volume's thinkers and ask them to draw a diagram showing how God, mind and body are related in that system. Display the diagrams side by side and discuss which system best preserves human responsibility.

• Essay

  Using Copleston's chapters, compare how Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza each answer the question of how the mind and the body are connected, and argue which answer creates the fewest new problems.

• Fiction

  Write a short story about a Dutch lens-grinder's apprentice in the 1670s who begins to read the manuscript his master keeps hidden. Keep the ideas faithful to Copleston's exposition of the Ethics.

Further Reading

• Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes

• Pensées, Blaise Pascal

• Ethics, Baruch Spinoza

• Monadology, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

• The Search after Truth, Nicolas Malebranche

• A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Bertrand Russell

  Russell's 1900 logical reading of Leibniz, the interpretation Copleston's readers would have known.