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Description of the Human Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

René Descartes
Translated by
John Cottingham ,
Robert Stoothoff  and
Dugald Murdoch
John Cottingham
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Summary

Translator's preface

The extracts that follow, which are based on the text in Volume XI of Adam and Tannery, are from an unfinished treatise, La Description du corps humain, first published by Clerselier in 1664 with his edition of the Treatise on Man. (The alternative title ‘On the formation of the foetus’, which Clerselier placed at the head of each page, properly relates only to Part Four of the treatise.) The work dates from the winter of 1647/8, as we know from a letter to Princess Elizabeth of January 1648, where Descartes talks of working on a ‘description of the functions of the animal and of man’. Frans Burman, who interviewed Descartes in April 1648, provides the following additional information:

In the treatise on the animal which he [Descartes] worked on this winter he noticed the following: although his aim was merely to explain the functions of the animal, he saw that he could hardly do this without having to explain the formation of the animal right from the beginning. And this was something that he found to be derivable from his principles to the extent that he was able to give a reason for the existence of the eye, nose, brain and so on. He saw, moreover, that the nature of these things was so constituted in accordance with his principles that it could not be otherwise. But these were all matters which he did not wish to go into at such length, and so he gave up writing the treatise.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes , pp. 313 - 324
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1985

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