In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty attributes to René Descartes the invention of a distinctively modern notion of the mind. According to Rorty, Descartes deviated from previous thinkers, both Aristotelian and Platonic, in taking the realm of the “mental” to include both the “sensory grasp of particulars” and the intellectual grasp of universals. What makes these apparently heterogeneous kinds both count as mental is the fact that we have indubitable access to the various states. Thus, Descartes made indubitability the new mark of the mental. Rorty claims that this new mark was connected to a new conception of the mind as “an inner arena with its inner observer.” This new conception in turn rendered knowledge of what exists outside of the inner arena problematic, and thus made it possible “to pose the problem of the veil of ideas, the problem which made epistemology central to philosophy.”

There can be no doubt that Descartes deviated in some significant ways from the psychology of Aristotle and the later scholastics. However, the deviations are linked less to epistemological preoccupations with external world skepticism than to a concern to articulate a new metaphysical conception of the mind and its relation to the material world. The first of the three sections in this chapter considers the Aristotelian and scholastic accounts of the soul that serve as the foil for Descartes’s discussions, and then takes up Descartes’s view of the mind and its influence on his early modern successors.