← Not Just the Tudors
Not Just the Tudors
Rene Descartes
00:36:55
What did Descartes believe and how have his ideas continued to resonate in modern philosophy and science?
Loading summary
Transcript77 lines
- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:30]
Flight Attendant
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now boarding Group A. Please have your boarding passes ready to scan. If your phone is cracked old or was chewed up by your Chihuahua travel companion, please refrain from holding up the line and instead simply go to Verizon and trade in any phone in any condition from one of their top brands. For the new Samsung Galaxy S25 plus with Galaxy AI on Unlimited ultimate and Watch or Tap also on them Service plan required for Watch or Tap drop, trade in and additional terms apply. See verizon.com for details.
- [00:59]
Katherine Wilson
To make switching to the new Boost.
- [01:00]
Flight Attendant
Mobile risk free, we're offering a 30.
- [01:02]
Katherine Wilson
Day money back guarantee.
- [01:03]
Flight Attendant
So why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T Mobile?
- [01:06]
Katherine Wilson
Because you have nothing to lose. Boost Mobile is offering a 30 day money back guarantee.
- [01:10]
Flight Attendant
No, I asked why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T Mobile?
- [01:13]
Katherine Wilson
Wouldn't because you love wasting money as a way to punish yourself because your mother never showed you enough love as a child.
- [01:20]
Flight Attendant
Whoa, easy there.
- [01:22]
Katherine Wilson
Yeah.
- [01:22]
Flight Attendant
Applies to online activations, requires port in and autopay. Customers activating in stores may be charged non refundable. I used to think buying foundation online was impossible. How am I supposed to find my shade when I can't even get it right in store? Then I discovered Il Maquillage. I took their AI powered quiz to find my custom match and wow. This foundation is literally my skin in a bottle. The undertone and coverage are spot on. It's so neutral and weightless I can't even tell I'm wearing makeup. Plus with Try before youe Buy, you can try your full size at home for 14 days. Take the Power Match Quiz now at ilmaquillage.com Quiz I L M A K I A G E.com Qu.
- [02:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the tudors. Born in 1596 in the village of La Haye, France. Rene Descartes has become known as the father of modern philosophy. A pioneer of rational thinking in the field of natural sciences, Descartes paved the way for our current working model of the formation of the solar system. While his work in mathematics laid the foundation for Isaac Newton's fundamental laws of motion. Before him, the majority of scientific thought was tied to the belief that the world was made up of four earth, water, air and fire, and that these elements corresponded with the four humors of the human body. For Descartes, the discovery of universal truths could only be achieved through the process of doubting all one's accepted beliefs. And it was only through the questioning of all, all things that we might discover what is true. My guest today is Katherine Wilson, Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the University of York, whose career has spanned the fields of moral philosophy, ethics, early microscopy, the aesthetics of nature and the philosophy of science. Among her influential published works are the Invisible, Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope, Moral Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory, and studies of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. Professor Wilson, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:06]
Katherine Wilson
Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk about Descartes.
- [04:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's start with some introductory questions, and you'll have to remember that I'm a historian and not a philosopher as we go on. So who was Rene Descartes?
- [04:22]
Katherine Wilson
Well, as you said, he's born at the end of the 16th century. He's educated by the Jesuits and exposed to a broad curriculum. The only subject he really says he liked in retrospect was math, but he ended up taking a law degree even though he never practiced. And once he left school, he started on his travels. He was in the army for a while, not as a combatant, but, but probably as something like a ballistics designer. You don't really know how his particular talents were supposed to be used in the army, but Prince Morris of Nassau seemed to appreciate them. He ended up living In, I think, 13 different places in the course of his life. Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, finally. And he died quite young at the age of 54. Started off being interested. I'm glad you started off with natural science, because that was his first interest before he got around to metaphysics. And you can really talk about two Descartes, the natural philosopher, interested in physics, physiology, human experience, thinking animals. Or you can talk about the metaphysician and the man who's ostensibly trying to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. But I think it's useful to start with the scientific context, as you did.
- [05:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And science, as we call it today, was known broadly as natural philosophy at the time. What was the role of philosophy more generally in the early modern period?
- [05:59]
Katherine Wilson
There are those two strands, even though they sometimes came together in the same book. So metaphysics talks about things you can't see, can't experience, especially God and the soul and the ways of God working in the world and moral duties owed to God and the nature of the soul and its different faculties. And natural philosophy talks about the cosmos and the human body, especially with Descartes talks about what are the basic constituents of nature. You mentioned the four elements. Atomism becomes very important just in around this time. Revival of epicurean ideas about what the world is actually made of. And of course, the microscope and the telescope are playing a role. They're all invented around the beginning of the 17th century. And Galileo makes extensive use of the telescope and many of his Italian colleagues, and later, especially in Britain and the Netherlands, they're making extensive use of the microscope and learning about the invisible world.
- [07:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So this is a time of enormous discovery and innovation in philosophy, in what we call science.
- [07:22]
Katherine Wilson
Absolutely. And it's also a period of enormous controversy because not only do you have lots and lots of books that, that you haven't really filtered, you don't know what's true and what's false in them. Anything can get published like the Internet in our time. And at the same time, this is a huge stimulus for people because they can get hold of books. They're very expensive and very hard to get hold of. They can compare what authors are saying. There was a wonderful book that came out in the 1980s, Elizabeth Eisenstein, the printing Press's Agent of Change. And that was a really good point to make at the time. It helps to explain what Descartes thinks is the situation that he's starting from. So we have all these new instruments and new books and challenges. How do you go forward?
- [08:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I suppose is it helpful, given everything you've said so far, to think of Descartes as something of a polymath?
- [08:27]
Katherine Wilson
He says that he didn't really enjoy much of his education. He didn't really like languages and literature and history. He thought it's all kind of interesting. But really what I like to do is math and figuring out how the physical world works. So he's not a polymath in the same sense that Leibniz wants, or that other Renaissance men, as we think of some Renaissance women, were calling that.
- [09:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so in the introduction I talked about him with this phrase that's often used about him as the father of modern philosophy. What does that mean?
- [09:10]
Katherine Wilson
Well, again, I think there are two strands and we can think it in the sense of our philosophy curriculum. Why would we start with Descartes? Or we can think of them in terms of natural philosophy. What was Descartes doing that was so fundamental to the way the science is developed? Let's start with the science one, because I think it's then easier to see where the metaphysics is going to fit in. What makes Descartes a father of the modern sciences? Well, he has tremendous confidence and he says to people, look, you've learned all this from the Bible about how the world came into being seven days. God created the earth and the water and the light, and then he populated it with animals and eventually humans. But he says, let's think about how it could have happened long before that. And then he tells you, he acts as though he's just spinning out kind of a fiction. But he says something which is really pretty shocking for the times. He says, just think of God as creating a block of matter and chopping it up into individual parts and setting them in motion and imposing some laws on them. Well, in time they will form the world just as we see it. If you leave it long enough, it's like monkeys and typewriters. You're going to get our world. And he even seems to have thought you could even get animals in that world because animals are purely material. He claims they don't have souls, they're just well put together mechanical devices. So that was pretty startling and also of course, pretty inspirational. You mentioned Newton as being inspired by Descartes, even though they had completely different theories of the solar system, why the planets were in orbit. Newton read Descartes very carefully, especially on theory of matter and laws of motion. And this theory of the animal machine was also incredibly productive because Descartes said the animal is just a kind of input output device. Stimulus comes in through the senses. And even though the animal doesn't experience colors and sounds and tastes as we do, still it's triggering something in its brain that makes it act appropriately in the situation. So it's the beginning of stimulus response theory. Also for humans. We just, he thought, have this add on that we experience qualities and have rationality in language, which he didn't think the animals had. So again, this was a new way to see the human body and a new way to understand perception and emotion as actually doing something functional for us, helping us live, enabling us to Live in many cases, especially where the emotions were concerned. That was really important because it meant the emotions are good. And that went against the whole tradition of Stoicism and Christian asceticism. So there was plenty to engage with. Yes.
- [12:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It seems that he's pushing the limits of thought at the time in multiple ways. And I suppose the first thing I want to ask is, given at this time, incipient scientific thought was often seen as a threat to the Church. One thinks of Galileo and the Italian Inquisition. Did he face any similar persecution or judgment for these controversial views?
- [13:00]
Katherine Wilson
Absolutely. It may have been one reason for leaving Paris and moving to Amsterdam, where conflicts was much freer. He ended up on the index in 1667, I don't think, for his Meditations, which he'll eventually get to, but most of his scientific works he was torn into by especially rooted theologians who accused him of reviving Epicurean atomism, which was closely associated with Epicurean atheism. Pascal said, I can't forgive Descartes. His God does nothing but give the world a little flick and set it in motion, the material world. And indeed, it's pretty hard to see how conventional Christian doctrines fit into a Cartesian system. Everything happens mechanically in that world, apart from things that go on in the mind. There were huge problems about transubstantiation in this corpuscular or atomistic system.
- [14:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Could you explain that to me? Could you explain why transubstantiation was problematic in this way of seeing the world, how it could not compute?
- [14:15]
Katherine Wilson
If you have an Aristotelian system, you have substance and qualities. So the substance is something unknown, like a piece of chalk, and the qualities are things like whiteness and flakiness and metallic taste, maybe. And when you want to transit, substantiate the bread into the body of Christ, on the old system, the substance remains the same, but the qualities are miraculously changed, even though you don't see them as such. And on the Cartesian system, bread is just a bunch of corpuscles in a certain arrangement that somehow give rise to the qualities of bread has being nourishing, being a certain color. But no matter what you do, you're just going to have corpuscles there in some arrangement or other, and those corpuscles will always give rise to the same sensory qualities. You have to sort of tie yourself in knots to explain how it becomes the body of Christ.
- [15:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So the most famous of his epithets is, you know, I think therefore I am. And we also have him writing about God as the author of nature and the eternal truths. So if we have these qualities in his thoughts, could we suppose that he's making a case for the exercise of thought, not only being proof of our own existence, but the existence of God? That he's thinking in a theist way, if not in a way that conforms to Christian orthodoxy at the time?
- [15:45]
Katherine Wilson
Well, I think there are two ways to look at it. And that raises the question, why does he write the Meditations in the first place? Because his contemporaries are pretty surprised when the Meditations come up, what he's done so far, even though he hasn't published much except his geometry and optics and his manuscripts have circulated, people have looked at them and they think of him as the author of this mechanical system of the world with its sort of pagan, atheistic overtones. And all of a sudden he writes a book that says, the purpose of this book is to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. I will prove this on rational grounds. And then he takes you through this beautiful argument, which, of course, everybody has a million problems with, including me, which in the end doesn't really prove the immortality of the soul, but it does make a pretty good case for the separation of soul and body in philosophical terms at the time. So why is he doing that? Well, he seems to be doing it in order to say, look, I'm really a pretty orthodox person and here's my proof. I've done this better than anybody else. I put this all on a really rational basis from very simple starting premises. And now you people should believe in everything I've written. It'll be safe for me to spring on the world my physical, cosmological, mechanical, animal, machine system.
- [17:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so you're very skeptical of his authentic belief in this. You feel like this is. Am I right in thinking you're understanding this to be a kind of intellectual exercise?
- [17:33]
Katherine Wilson
Well, it's hard to say because I think, yes, I think the proof thing is an intellectual exercise, but I think it's very hard to say. I mean, I'm an atheistical person, but I think with believers it's sometimes really hard to say, do they believe this or do they think it's a good thing to believe? I know they have their moments of doubt when they don't entirely believe it, but then they come back because it's been a test of faith. So I think with religious belief, it's not cut and dried with most people. I think Descartes has this sort of streak of piety in him, but I don't think he believes in Christian miracles. And I'm not even sure he believes in the immortality of the soul.
- [18:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Perhaps this is a good moment to ask what are some of the common misconceptions, therefore, about Cartesian thought?
- [18:31]
Katherine Wilson
I think one of them is that that's where the meditation stops, with the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. And that's usually where you stop when you get this text as an undergraduate. You go through the demon argument, you go through the proofs for the existence of God, clear and distinct ideas, all these very important concepts. And then you come to Meditation 6, which gets kind of weird, because all of a sudden Descartes is talking about how the mind and body are connected and how all your experiences depend on mediation by the brain. You think, what's that doing at the end of the book? Why did he tack that on? He should have just stopped with the separation between mind and body. Immortality, it was a soul, which he never actually got around to. And I think the answer is he's going back to his old scientific interests, and he's managed to smuggle them in already into this metaphysical treatise. And it's interesting that, as you know, he sends out the Meditations before he publishes it, to collect objections. And he collects objections from a range of people, a bunch of theologians, and also his materialist contemporaries, like Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi. And the materialists, of course, lied into him and say, you haven't really proved the immortality or even the incorporeality of the soul. But so do a lot of the theologians. They don't think he really proved it either. So he's under suspicion from all sides. And he's under suspicion even a bit later from people who think Meditations was completely fake. He was just putting it out there. Already in the 17th century, they're raising a question about that.
- [20:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think that this is one of those works where we really need to set it in its historical context? Does it help us understand the development of these ideas if we do so?
- [20:45]
Katherine Wilson
Absolutely. I think that's really important with all of these philosophers. At the same time, I think there's something kind of special about Descartes. Do you have to kind of look at him? You have to split it off kind of prismatically. On one hand, there's contextual study, which I'm totally in favor of, but on the other hand, you have to appreciate the argument, which is really exceptionally beautiful. It's all compacted into about 90 pages, and in some ways it's like a mathematical proof, because you're really going stepwise stepwise, stepwise. It's different from most mathematical proofs in that you keep wanting to stop and say, wait a minute, does that really follow? Or what is this assumption you're introducing at this point? Nevertheless, as one continuous chain of reasoning, there's been nothing like it since.
- [21:58]
Flight Attendant
Work Management Platforms ugh. Endless onboarding. IT bottlenecks admin requests but what if things were different? Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding, beautiful reports in minutes, custom workflows you can build on your own, easy to use prompt, free AI. Huh?
- [22:20]
Katherine Wilson
Turns out you can love a work management platform.
- [22:23]
Flight Attendant
Monday.com the first work platform you'll love to use Renew your health and wellness.
- [22:29]
Katherine Wilson
Purpose this new year with the Reset.
- [22:32]
Flight Attendant
On ALO Moves, a curated weekly program of Pilates, strength and step goals to.
- [22:36]
Katherine Wilson
Kickstart your fitness journey. It's a 30 day, week by week program.
- [22:40]
Flight Attendant
Three days of Pilates, two days of.
- [22:42]
Katherine Wilson
Strength and 8,000 daily steps. Plus bonus nutrition tips from Sakara. Plus for only $99, you get a year's worth of access to Alo moves on demand. Full studio experience wherever you are.
- [22:55]
Flight Attendant
Get moving today@alomoves.com Valentine's Day is coming up, and for me, there's only one place I trust. 1 800flowers.com this year, 1-800-Flowers wants to make sure you're a Valentine's hero with an exclusive offer. Double the roses for free. When you buy one dozen, they'll double your bouquet to two dozen roses. It's the perfect way to say I love you without breaking the bank. Trust me, 1-800-Flowers always delivers. To claim your double the roses offer, go to 1-800-Flowers.com acast. That's 1-800-Flowers. Com acast.
- [23:28]
Katherine Wilson
It took a lifetime to find the person you want to marry. Finding the perfect engagement ring is a lot easier. @bluenile.com you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from Blue Niles jewelry experts who are on hand 247 to answer questions and the ease and convenience of shopping online. For a limited time, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with code listenile.com that's $50 off with code listen@bluenile.com.
- [24:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It would be lovely if you could give us a bit of a flavor of that. I don't know if this is a terribly challenging question, but it'd be lovely if you could give us a flavour of that, of its essential theories. Just for those who haven't read meditations that they could get a Taste of Descartes thought.
- [24:24]
Katherine Wilson
Let's see if I can sort of recapitulate. It starts out thinking I must have been taught a lot of false things along with some true things. And all these authorities contradict each other. And I've been indoctrinated since childhood with certain dogmas. I need to start over because I have no idea otherwise how I'm going to sort out my knowledge from my error. And he goes through various efforts. Maybe I'm dreaming. No, decides, probably not dreaming. And he comes up with this remarkable thought experiment of the evil genius. The evil genius is like a superpower that can deceive him about whether he is experiencing a world. The evil genius will take away all the physical objects, all the people, all the animals, and now what? Okay, I've supposed that's what the evil genius has done. But I still am thinking. I'm still experiencing. I'm still experiencing a world. So it's like the perfect hallucination. And then he starts seeing what we can draw out just from the assumption that all he's doing is experiencing whether there's a world or not. And he manages to pull out from that the existence of God. Because something has to be responsible for why he's experiencing it all. Could it just be himself? And so goes on existence of God. And then he gets to the problem, well, can I infer anything about a world outside my mind? And again, he goes at it in a kind of indirect way. He goes at it by thinking about what happens when he's thinking about a triangle just in his head. And he decides, well, he must be looking at something that is not himself. So now we have something that is not himself, and he must be looking at something kind of in his head. And this leads him to think, finally, that there is a world outside of him, but this world is purely material. Actually, way back in the second meditation, he started thinking about what could physical objects be like, if there are any. He still doesn't know that there are any. And he decides they have no qualities, they're just matter. And he's able to, by the time he gets to the sixth meditation, draw this radical break between the physical world of purely material things, including his own body, and his mind. And to decide that one has no qualities in common with the other. One is destructible, so the other is indestructible. He thinks he's shown, hence the immortality of the soul. Although he has to elaborate on that.
- [27:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That was virtuosic. Thank you so much.
- [27:14]
Katherine Wilson
There's more, therefore, refinements to it.
- [27:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm sure there are, but as a summary, that was pretty impressive. Should we think of Descartes as a moral philosopher? I mean, what place does ethics have in his ideas?
- [27:26]
Katherine Wilson
Well, not very much really. And he's starting out in his discourse on method. He says, well, I'm just going to provide myself with a provisional morality which is basically obey the laws and you'll get along okay. He has interesting things to say about the emotions, as I mentioned that basically they're all good. So against the stoics who thought they were pretty much all bad, because what you were aiming at was tranquility and you really needed to moderate them all the time. Descartes seems to think their emotions are the source of our joy in life. And of course people who have to take mind numbing drugs for their various conditions report that the world seems very flat and uninteresting when they're not responding emotionally. So the defense of the emotions and rejection of stoicism I think are important ethically. But I wouldn't say he was an influential moral philosopher.
- [28:49]
Flight Attendant
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now boarding Group A. Please have your boarding passes ready to scan. If your phone is cracked, old or was chewed up by your Chihuahua travel companion, please refrain from holding up the line and instead simply go to Verizon and trade in any phone in any condition from one of their top brands. For the new Samsung Galaxy S25 plus with Galaxy AI on Unlimited ultimate and Watch or Take tab also on now Service plan required for Watch or Tap. Trade in and additional terms apply. See verizon.com for details. Hi, this is Freddy Wong from Dungeons and Daddies and this episode is sponsored by Rocket Money Blast Houston. We have a savings. That's right. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that empowers you to save more, spend less, and take control of your financial life. Basically, you can see all of your checking, savings, credit cards and investments in one convenient place. You can understand your spending trends and most importantly, you can categorize those expenses and set up a custom budget by identifying top spending categories. Listen, you want to track bank statements, it's very difficult. Use Rocket Money to help keep track of all your finances. Rocket money is over 5 million happy members and it's saved its users over $1 billion across all of the app's premium features. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Get Rocket money today@rocketmoney.com allin1 that's rocketmoney.com allinone.
- [30:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So I want to go back to where we started to think about his role in the scientific revolution, because I feel that we have talked about some of the things that are best known about him, but this idea that he's working on the basic tenets of laws of physics or laws of motion is less well known. I don't know if this is an ahistorical question, but is this something to ask about how he saw the relationship between philosophy and scientific thought at the time, or is it broadly conceived of as one realm of thought?
- [30:51]
Katherine Wilson
It's one realm for 17th century philosophers, and even going into the 18th century, it's really one realm. Even though metaphysics, the study of things that you can't directly experience, is seen as having separate demands. But for everybody, Hall, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, even Kant, they're all talking about natural philosophy as well as metaphysics. Well, I'm not a specialist in this department at all, so I can't really answer that question. What he does is try to use algebra and geometry. And Jotno, if he is the absolutely first person to do that, or how influential it is. So I can't really tell you. But his optics, which are geometrical optics, were influential. And optics becomes increasingly an important subject, especially in this age of optical instruments and learning about how the eye works and processes information.
- [31:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what influence does he have on Newton? You've mentioned he is influencing the development of thought at this time. Could you explain that a bit more?
- [31:58]
Katherine Wilson
Well, they have two competing theories of the solar system. So for Descartes, even though motions are straight line motions, in most cases he thinks God has created what he calls vortices, spinning vortices like whirlpools. And these vortices are adjacent to one another and they whirl the planets around a bunch of suns. So there are multiple worlds, multiple solar systems, also a bit scandalous for the time, even though becoming more accepted. And Newton points out that this doesn't make really any sense. What's happening at the edge of these vortices where they're in collision? That's one problem. There are a bunch of other problems. And Newton instead, of course, has this theory of universal gravitation, where the object, the circulated, the orbiting object would be moving in a straight line, except that it's pulled towards the center, the heavier body there, and that generates a circular motion. So the influence is a bit negative. Even though, as we were saying, he's read Descartes principles, his idea of a complete set of mechanical laws of interaction is very influential for him. Most of those laws of Motion that Descartes comes up with are wrong, but this is quickly seen by his immediate successors.
- [33:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I suppose it's necessary to fail in order to succeed.
- [33:28]
Katherine Wilson
Exactly. That's what happened. Another big difference in their scientific views is that Descartes does seem to think that the universe created itself once God had provided the necessary conditions. And Newton is really opposed to this, or at least opposed to maintaining this publicly. And he remains a creationist. The least creationists were animals, as most people were until quite late, except those who follow the Epicurean line that they just came from concourse of atoms. But Newton says, how could animals have arisen by chance? How could the symmetry of the animal form, two arms, two legs, two eyes, have arisen? If you just imagine atoms zooming around and forming coalitions, though, Descartes seems quite open to that idea.
- [34:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you say that when he sent out proof copies, as it were, of Meditations, he's asking for feedback after this is published, this is circulating. How are his theories then being received by theologians, by fellow philosophers, and how did he respond?
- [34:45]
Katherine Wilson
But he comes in for a lot of criticism from all the main philosophers who follow, from Spinoza, from Leibniz, from Locke, from Kant. At the same time, as we were saying, he's the father of modern philosophy. So the things that people particularly pick on are, of course, mind, body, interaction. If you have these two substances, how do you manage to see anything? How does the physical world actually cause anything to happen in your incorporeal soul? So they pick on that and they don't think his proofs are particularly good for the existence of God. Some of them want to go whole hog and say, why do you suppose humans are an exception? Maybe humans too are just machines and maybe animals. Many people think animals do obviously have experiences. That's a very unpopular view, that animals are unconscious automata. He gets complaints from Henry Moore, who owns a dog and says, obviously my dog hears my voice, sees me, shows joy when I enter the room, things like that.
- [35:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And more generally speaking, when it comes to the public, did his work achieve commercial success in his lifetime?
- [36:04]
Katherine Wilson
I think everybody with a philosophical interest read the Meditations. Anybody interested in natural philosophy read his Principles of Philosophy. I think there was some general readership for the Meditations, but there is not a huge reading public. Even in the 18th century, if maybe 2% of the population is actually reading books, it's a small, small number of people.
- [36:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We do know, however, that one of the people who was interested in his ideas was Queen Christina of Sweden, and she invites him towards the end of his life to organize a new scientific academy and to give her private instruction. This is rather amazing. What do we know about their relationship?
- [36:48]
Katherine Wilson
I was asking myself the question, thinking about this talk, why were different women interested in Cartesian philosophy? There's Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom he has a long correspondence about mind and body. And then Queen Bastina invites him up. So what's the attraction here? Of course, Leibniz has many female correspondence and brands. Hobbes, I'm not too sure, but I think one of the reasons might have been Descartes says, just use your own brain. You don't have to have been to a university. You don't have to read Latin. You don't have to get involved with all this church dogma that tells you what an evil person you are. As the spawn of Eve and the bearer of original sin. You can just use your own mind to figure things out and understand the world. And I can imagine this being a very sympathetic message for women of the time.
- [37:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think you're absolutely right. I mean, what an edifying thing to be told if the other context is to be told that you are the devil's gateway and the bearer of original sin and that you don't know how to think because you haven't gone to university. It feels very empowering.
- [38:08]
Katherine Wilson
Yeah.
- [38:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We have Descartes here as a proto feminist. We've reached the 375th anniversary of his death, so I would like to ask your thoughts on his enduring legacy. What is it about his ideas that have continued to retain relevance throughout the centuries or have continued to be provocative in their irrelevance? How does he continue to influence thought?
- [38:36]
Katherine Wilson
Well, he is, on one hand, a model of clear stepwise argument. So we will always use him for teaching young students how to construct a philosophical argument. This liking for visualizable models in physics, I think if you can't see it in your mind, you don't really understand it. That's been very, very important, though a bit misleading when you get down to the quantum world. But probably one of the main ideas. Is this a evil demon idea, the idea that the world could just be my hallucination. And there's a kind of softer version of that and a harder version of that. The softer version is one that we accept scientifically. It's that our experience of the world just depends on how our brain is dealing with light waves, corpuscles, impulses, et cetera. And different animals will have different kinds of experience of what we think of as the world. Though there is no the world, they're just a bunch of worlds that we experience and other sentient beings experience and then something unknown concept behind it. So that's kind of the soft version and we all accept that. Now the hard version is this hallucination scenario. And that of course came up in the famous Matrix movie, which I haven't seen, so I can't comment on it in detail, but it's a thought that I'm sure has occurred to people many times. What if. What? This is all not real? I was just reading earlier because one thing was leading me to the next about the Boltzmann brain. I didn't know anything about this before, but apparently Boltzmann, the 19th century physicist, came up with an argument that it is vastly more probable that a random brain will form in the cosmos with a memory, with a fake memory of course, of its experiences. So I could be a Boltzmann brain. Maybe in the cosmos all the little particles just came together. And that is the thing that is now, I think, myself in a world of objects. And that's a version of the Cartesian problem. How do you know you're not a Boltzmann brain? And this seems to be taken rather seriously by a number of physicists about can there be many Boltzmann brains? How long would they last? Aren't we outnumbered by Boltzmann brains in this world? Maybe they're the real experiencers and a bunch of Boltzmann brains. So that's where that one led. Yes.
- [41:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The way of solipsism perhaps?
- [41:26]
Katherine Wilson
Yes, exactly. Well, and also idealist philosophies in general.
- [41:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in pop culture. We have that in the Matrix, as you say. I'm also thinking of the Truman show, but these fascinating. Catherine, thank you so much for such a clear introduction to complex philosophical thought and scientific ideas that take us back to understanding Descartes thought and also how it has been misunderstood and misrepresented over the intervening centuries.
- [41:58]
Katherine Wilson
You're very welcome. It's been a pleasure.
- [42:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you. Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, professor Susanna Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from history Hit.
- [42:27]
Flight Attendant
Enjoy a brilliant sleep experience with Soundcore from Anker. Stressed out by your partner's snoring? Having trouble falling asleep? Waking up too easily? Suffering from poor quality sleep. Now put on Soundcore Sleep, a 20 earbuds experience. Unparalleled pressure free comfort. Perfect for side sleepers. Choose your favorite sound in your curated playlist. Feel your body getting lighter and lighter and enjoy a full night of peaceful sleep with the A20's long lasting battery. Then wake up feeling fresh with a personal built in alarm. Get the sleep you deserve with Soundcore Sleep A20 earbuds. Discover more on soundcore.com S O U N D C O R E Soundcore Use code sleep at Checkout to get $30 off S L E E P in all caps ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend this season on the Dream Supplies are being provided by nurses who run out in the middle of the night and purchase diapers, but the hospital is still charging as if they still have these items. We are digging into every topic we've ever wanted to cover on this show. It's a spinning plate analogy.
- [43:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The second that you stop spinning those plates, that crashes.
- [43:47]
Flight Attendant
So you can never stop working. The Dream Season 4 comes at you weekly. Starting Monday, January 20th. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.