The Good Cartesian

Steven Nadler presents a biographical and philosophical study of Louis de La Forge (1632-1666), a medical doctor who was an extremely important, but for a long time relatively neglected, follower of Descartes in the seventeenth century. His sophisticated contributions to the metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and physiology of Cartesianism in the decades after Descartes' death in 1650 were instrumental in making that philosophy the dominant philosophical paradigm of the period; it would be supplanted by Newtonianism only in the eighteenth century. La Forge began his Cartesian career by providing wood-cut illustrations and an extensive commentary for the 1664 edition of Descartes' Traite de l'homme, the first original-language publication of part of the larger, groundbreaking treatise Le Monde that was left unpublished in Descartes' lifetime. In his commentary, La Forge is a devoted and faithful but not uncritical disciple who defends, supplements, updates and even corrects Descartes' account of the human body, which treats it as a