editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
no edit summary
|Criticism=Descartes’ ideas saw widespread criticism in his time and shortly after from all manner of sources, including Scholastic vanguards, religious authorities, and other philosophers. One common early criticism was that his new views were threatening to the Christian faith. [[CiteRef::Jolley (1992)]] In 1663, his works were placed on the Catholic Church's ''Index of Forbidden books'', and in 1671 his conception was officially banned from schools.
In the early modern period, theological propositions and natural philosophical propositions both formed part of the same scientific mosaic, and thus [[The First Zeroth Law|one needed reconciliation with the other]]. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 190-196]] One specific theological criticism of Descartes was that his mechanistic corpuscular natural philosophy could not be easily reconciled with the Catholic ''doctrine of transubstantiation''. This doctrine had been proposed by Thomas Aquinas as an Aristotelian explanation for the Christian dogma of the ''Real Presence''. The dogma maintained that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, Christ is really (as opposed to metaphorically or symbolically) present in the bread and wine. Aquinas had posited that the Aristotelian substance of the bread and wine were replaced with the body and blood of Christ, while their forms (that of bread and wine) remaining unchanged. In Descartes' corpuscularism, bread and wine differed from flesh and blood because they had a different arrangement of corpuscles. There is no obvious way that one could appear as the other. Anglican Christians did not accept the ''doctrine of transubstantiation'' and thus Cartesianism did not face objections based on it, and became accepted at Cambridge University by 1680. Catholic Paris didn't accept it until 1700. Many solutions reconciling Cartesianism and the ''Real Presence'' were, by then, proposed. Barseghyan speculates that the one accepted by the Parisian community was that proposed by Antoine Arnauld in 1671, in which Christ's presence in the Eucharist was due to a miracle beyond human comprehension, and outside the ordinary course of nature described by Cartesianism.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 194]]
Another sort of objection raised in commentaries on Descartes had to do with the fact that corpuscular explanation involved hypothetical unobservable entities, and the supposition that this invisibly small world could be understood by analogy with larger objects. Descartes countered that "there is nothing more in keeping with reason that we judge about those things that we do not perceive, because of their small size, by comparison and contrast with those that we see" [[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)|p. 267]] He felt that a plausible model, though potentially incorrect due to the unobservability of its fundamental parts, was better than none at all.