Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the L.m.U in Munich. Online at Historyof Philosophy.net. Today's episode, What he should have said,

The Early Cartesian's. What should Descartes have told Elizabeth when she pressed him to

explain the interaction of mind and body? Well, we've already seen one suggestion from modern-day Descartes scholar, Dan Garber.

As we saw, he has pointed to evidence that, for Descartes, motion in bodies is caused by God.

When the Arsenal forward, Bukai Osaka, scores a goal, is not the impact of the ball that makes

the back of the net ripple, but God. In fact, it's also God who makes the ball move when

Saka's foot hits it. By contrast, it would be Saka himself, or rather his soul, who moves his

foot by manipulating the pineal gland in his brain, which is connected to his leg

through his nervous system. But either way, it is always a mind, whether divine or human,

that gives rise to motion. So, Elizabeth should not have been puzzled by the minds moving the

body, or at least no more puzzled by this than by the apparent motion of one body by another.

This is a clever proposal on Garber's part, though as I also mentioned at the time,

it is not one shared by all interpreters. In fact, there are passages where Descartes seems

unequivably to be saying that one body does move another, albeit within the laws laid down by God.

Alternatively, Descartes may have thought that when the ball hits the back of the net,

both the ball and God caused the net to move. God would then be a concurrent cause,

meaning that he cooperates with created causes to bring about the effects we observe.

This debate over Descartes's intentions and over the role of God in causing events in the

created world goes back to the immediate reception of his works.

It became one of the central issues, if not the central issue, in early Cartesianism.

I suspect that one reason for this may be the religious context.

Since the outbreak of the Reformation, in fact even longer than that, theological dispute had

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