How did a little-known 17th-century physician help shape Cartesian philosophy after René Descartes by trying to complete its account of the mind, the body, and their union?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on 17th century philosophy, and he has a variety of published works in this area.
Check out his book, "The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm"!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-good-cartesian-9780197671719
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197671713
2. Book Summary
Steven Nadler’s The Good Cartesian tells the story of how Louis de La Forge—a young provincial physician—helped René Descartes’s philosophy become a dominant “new” paradigm in the decades after 1650. Nadler opens with the broader French and European backdrop: institutional anxiety about “philosophical novelties” and the way Cartesianism was increasingly seen as a threat to traditional Scholastic frameworks, especially in sensitive theological contexts. Against that setting, Nadler argues that La Forge’s role has been underappreciated: not only is he a key early figure in debates about occasionalism, but he is also central to how second-generation Cartesians tried to complete, correct, and extend Descartes’s system while still presenting themselves as faithful disciples.
The book then reconstructs La Forge’s life, networks, and projects in detail, showing how a thinker working far from Paris nonetheless became deeply involved in the Cartesian movement—through local intellectual milieus, ties to Cartesian promoters, and access to manuscripts and correspondence. Nadler portrays La Forge as “the most loyal of all Cartesians,” someone who wanted to articulate not just what Descartes said but what Descartes would have said if he’d lived longer, done more anatomical work, and absorbed later scientific developments. The heart of Nadler’s historical case is that there had never been a single sustained study of La Forge’s main contributions: (i) his role in illustrating and commenting on the first French edition of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (1664) and (ii) his own Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, which aims to finish Descartes’s account of the human being by treating the mind and its relation to body.
Finally, Nadler offers a chapter-by-chapter philosophical analysis of what La Forge actually adds to Cartesianism—especially in philosophy of mind and causation: the nature of the Cartesian mind, the mind–body union, occasionalist explanations, the mechanics of bodies, mind–motion interaction, and the structure of ideas and volitions. A central theme is La Forge’s attempt to demystify “union” by treating it as a stable, law-like reciprocity between mental and bodily states grounded in God’s instituted order, not as some further metaphysical glue; on this view, union persists as long as the relevant capacities for coordinated interaction remain. In the conclusion, Nadler argues that La Forge’s overall position is subtle: while bodies (as mere extension) are passive and so push La Forge toward strong divine-causation claims about bodily motion, La Forge simultaneously insists that the mind is active and (in an important sense) causally efficacious over its own thoughts and volitions—yielding something closer to a “conservationist” picture for the mind than a fully thoroughgoing occasionalism.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:59 - Overview
04:03 - Historical factors
06:35 - Importance of other figures
08:11 - Eucharist
13:36 - Louis de La Forge
15:27 - Treatise on Man
19:04 - Commentary
21:04 - Motivation
21:54 - What is a “good Cartesian”?
27:19 - Treatise on the human mind
33:32 - Causation
37:24 - Occasionalism
40:48 - Partial occasionalism
42:13 - Why does only God have this power?
47:33 - Is the view coherent?
50:00 - Other potential contributions
51:39 - Pineal gland
55:01 - Immortality of the soul
57:33 - Value of philosophy
59:27 - Conclusion
