Cartesianism

In England there was less enthusiasm. In 1644 Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) set out his own eclectic version of Descartes's philosophy (and invited Descartes to come and live in England), and later in the decade Henry More (1614–1687), the Cambridge Platonist, explored various features of Cartesianism in his correspondence with Descartes. But Cartesianism soon developed a reputation for heterodoxy in England, above all because of his rejection of any aims or ends acting in nature, and his writings were widely attacked in the second half of the seventeenth century. In France, Louis XIV banned the teaching of Cartesian philosophy, and Cartesians were excluded from the Académie des Sciences. While these attacks were directed at the perceived radical nature of Cartesianism, others such as Daniel Huet (1630–1721), a patron of the Jesuits, were charging him with plagiarism: Huet claimed he took his epistemology from the Greek skeptics, the cogito from Augustine, and the ontological argument from Anselm.

However, Descartes had disciples in France, including Claude Clerselier (1614–1684), who oversaw the publication of his letters and other hitherto unpublished works (a laborious undertaking, which included retrieving the trunk containing them from the sea and drying them out), establishing a vital resource for scholars all over Europe and in the New World. Moreover, there was a strong French Cartesian movement in natural philosophy, centered on Jacques Rohault (1620–1672) and Pierre-Sylvain Régis (1632–1707), in the second half of the century, and by the 1670s there was a movement applying the Cartesian principle of "clear and distinct ideas" to social and political questions, with radical consequences: François Poulain de la Barre (1647–1723) was defending the equality of the sexes on this basis, and Descartes's niece, Catherine, was proposing Cartesianism as an alternative (with women particularly in mind) to the philosophy of the universities. The peculiar political circumstances in France—Louis in effect brought a delayed Counter-Reformation to France—resulted in a radicalization of Cartesianism in the late seventeenth century. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, there were Cartesians in painting (Charles Le Brun), architecture (the Perrault brothers), and music (Jean-Philippe Rameau), and Descartes had become almost an establishment figure in France, as the famous attack on him by Voltaire indicates, where he was castigated for being out of date in comparison with developments in English philosophy. Yet by the 1770s he was radicalized again, as the Enlightenment philosophes claimed him as a corevolutionary.

Descartes had a deep concern for orthodoxy—even his advocacy of mechanism, in the form of the doctrine of the inertness of nature, can be seen as a response to the heterodox naturalism of the Renaissance, where the powers attributed to nature leave little room for a divine role—and had written his Principles of Philosophy with a view to having it adopted as a textbook in Jesuit colleges. Nevertheless, much of his work was bitterly condemned by the Catholic Church after his death. His writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1663, primarily it would seem because of his heterodox account of transubstantiation, but his view that ours is not the only solar system also elicited explicit condemnations from religious authorities throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century.