Dark Night of the Early Modern Soul: Humanism, Dualing Cartesianisms, Jesuits, and the New Physiology in the Shaping of Enlightenment Thought

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2019

Publication Title

Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

DOI

10.3167/hrrh.2019.450102

ISSN

1939-2419

Abstract

During the sixteenth century, Jesuit renovations of medieval Aristotelian conceptions of the soul afforded an important discursive field for René Descartes to craft a notion of the soul as a substance distinct from the body and defined by thought. Cartesianism, however, augmented rather than diminished the skeptical crisis over the soul and the mind–body union. This article explores the work of a Jesuit intellectual, René-Joseph Tournemine, whose attempt to navigate between Malebranche’s Cartesianism and the metaphysics of Leibniz proved influential during the eighteenth century in ways that intersect with the development of Enlightenment biological science. Tournemine’s theologically motivated conjectures about the nature of the mind–body union reinforced an important shift away from considering the soul as a metaphysical substance in favor of seeing it as a pervasive motive force or vital principle animating the human organism.

Copyright

© Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques and Berghahn Books 2019

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