Descartes ’ Mechanism and Biological Functions

The “new mechanical philosophy” takes its inspiration from biology and simultaneously traces its origin to René Descartes. It pays little attention to Descartes’ mechanistic biology, however, which, admittedly, even most historians of philosophy and science mistakenly treat as a straightforward extension of Descartes’ attempt to explain natural phenomena in terms of shapes and movement of parts. In this article, I discuss the status of biological functions in Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy. While avoiding the pitfall of misidentifying the parts of living things or the causal systems they constitute, I argue that Descartes’ mechanistic biology evinces a strong anthropocentrism both with respect to its goals and, more surprisingly, its metaphysical foundations. Today’s mechanistic biology is no longer anthropocentric, and it cannot embrace the metaphysical foundations Descartes proposes, but examining Descartes’ account of biological functions identifies problems any mechanistic philosophy must face that only his anthropocentrism allowed him to solve.