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Descartes and the Algebra of Soul
Review of Descartes: An Intellectual Biography and Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
Paul Miers

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Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 499 pages.
Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1995. 312 pages.
Descartes' error, Antonio Damasio tells us, was his belief in "the abyssal separation between body and mind . . . " (250). As Damasio notes, there are certainly many specific "errors" in Descartes' writings--that heat causes the circulation of the blood, for example, or that movement is translated instantaneously through the plenum from one object to another--but all these notions have been "corrected" by subsequent theory in ways that we can imagine Descartes himself might easily accept. The "abyssal separation" persists as the central cliché of modern philosophy because we do not yet agree on a solution, and Descartes serves as the convenient scapegoat for those who want to argue for the reduction of mind to matter. Damasio himself is part of a new generation of neuroscientists who, using the framework of connectionism or neural network theory, think they posses a solution to the mind/body [End Page 943] problem. The actual object of his attack is thus not so much Descartes but those cognitive psychologists who have defined themselves in terms of a Cartesian "nativism" or doctrine of innate elements of knowledge not derived from sensation. None of these "nativists" literally believes in mind/ body dualism, but insofar as they cling to the central functionalist dogma that mind can be instantiated in any physical system they de facto treat mind as something that can be considered apart from embodiment, and they embrace, more or less, an overtly Cartesian methodology, which Jerry...