Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies.

In a letter dated 18 July 1629 to Guillaume Gibieuf, Descartes announced his determination to write a short tract on metaphysics and emphasized his longtime interest in this branch of philosophy. In fact, he acknowledged the relevance of metaphysics as a favored topic because it was the base of his new physics. Descartes declared he could demonstrate that his metaphysical notions were more evident than the geometrical ones.

Descartes probably put down some hints of his doctrine but his metaphysical theories can be found, for the first time, in the fourth part of his Discourse on Method (1637). The Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641) contain the complete and ordered exposition of his metaphysics.

Descartes's correspondence from 1639 to 1640 is an invaluable primary source for clarifying the genesis of the Meditations and their peculiar structure. In spring 1640 Descartes gave some copies of his manuscript to various friends in order to get their comments. He intended to place his metaphysical work, before its publication, at the center of the philosophical and theological debates in order to prevent some harsh and unforeseen refutations and criticisms. When the first edition was published (1641) in Paris, the book contained Descartes's text, various objections, and his replies ("responsiones"). In the second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) Descartes introduced some modifications and further objections (the Seventh ones) and replies.

In recent years some international conferences took place in Europe and in the United States aimed at commemorating the 350th anniversary of the publication of the Meditations. This volume is the result of a preliminary conference which took place in 1992.

The unifying principle of this collection of original essays is an attempt both to deepen our knowledge of Descartes's philosophy and to try a contextualization of the Meditations. Such a contextualization is accomplished by a careful reconstruction of the cultural milieu in which the Meditations "were conceived, written and presented to the public" (2). In their prologue, the editors emphasize a specific feature of the Cartesian metaphysics: the metaphysical concepts and ideas were modified, specified and improved during the preparation of the Replies.

In her epilogue, Marjorie Grene calls attention to a particular methodological purpose of the volume, that is, the advocacy of a dialectical approach, in the sense of Plato, to the history of philosophy. Grene states that for the practice of the history of philosophy it is necessary to enter into the universe of the discourse of one's interlocutor, and that such a history understood in contextual perspective appears to be continuous with philosophy itself (236-37). Therefore, Platonic dialectic and contextualization seem to be the instruments for a new writing of the history of philosophy.

In the Italian culture and philosophical community, the history of philosophy has been for many years a much more cultivated topic than the purely theoretical inquiry or the analytical philosophy. In 1959 Eugenio Garin published a book on the aims of philosophical research, significantly entitled Philosophy as a Historical Knowledge, which greatly influenced the Florentine school of philosophy, and my university training was at that school. As a historian of philosophy and ideas, I am greatly impressed by the recent American and British re-discovery of the history of philosophy as a reconstruction of the dialogues which historically took place among the philosophers. This renewed interest in the history of philosophy is testified by Descartes and His Contemporaries.

Jean-Luc Marion's opening essay has a general character and focuses on the place of the Objections in the context of the Cartesian philosophy. The French scholar gives some important information on the development of Descartes's metaphysics from the Discours to the Meditationes. He specifies the dialogue, the argumentation, the scheme "text, objections, replies," as the main features of the whole of Descartes's philosophy. So, the peculiar structure of the Meditations is to be considered a common mark, not an exception. Marion notes that the Meditations are "first and essentially replies given in 1641 to the objections formulated in 1637" (16), and he rightly concludes that Cartesian thought, far from being a soliloquy or solipsism, "is inscribed in its very origin in the responsorial space of dialogue" (20).

The other essays follow the structure of the Meditations of 1642, clarifying various aspects of the Objections and Replies. Theo Verbek and J.-R. Armogathe consider the life and works of Johannes Caterus, the Dutch theologian who was the author of the neglected First Objections. A very interesting paper by Peter Dear furnishes a reconstruction of the relationships between the argumentative structure of the Meditations and that model of mathematical knowledge which was very popular in the seventeenth century. Daniel Garber deals with Jean-Baptiste Morin, astrologer and physician, whose works are relevant in order to understand the Second Objections. Papers by Tom Sorell, Edwin Curley, Vincent Carraud, Steven Nadler, Margaret J. Osler, Thomas M. Lennon and Stephen Menn consider the great interlocutors of Descartes, that is, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi. They examine some crucial aspects of the seventeenth century metaphysics, seen as a vivid picture of ancient traditions and conceptual novelties. Roger Ariew's essay on Pierre Bourdin and the Seventh Objections closes the volume.

In sum, this book amply demonstrates the significance of the controversies for understanding the characters of Descartes's metaphysics and the relevance of a historical approach to philosophy.

FERDINANDO ABBRI University of Siena, Italy