John Cottingham, Cartesian Ethics: Reason and the Passions, Revue Internationale de Philosophie vol 50, I/1996, no. 195, 193-216

...despite of his dualistic metaphysics, Descartes became increasing preoccupied, whren he came to develop the details of his elliptical system, with the need for a genuine 'anthropology' - one which would do justice to the inescapable fact that we are not merely incorporeal minds inhabiting an alien mechanism, but creatures whose welfare is, in a special and intimate way, ound up with the operations of the body (p. 200f.).

...those exercised with the problem of psychophysical causation (...) are hardly liekly to have their worries allayed by being told that the soul interacts, not with the body as a whole, but with a particular gland in the brain. But it is important not to be sidetracked by Descartes' bizarre choice of a specific organ to be the 'seat of the soul'. For all its awkwardness, Descartes theory does succeed in pointing out a crucial feature about the nature of human emotional and sensory awareness, namely that the various modes of such awareness are intimately linked with physiologically determined processes of which in our ordinary lives we are, for the most par, wuite ignorant (p. 206).

Descartes, the very thinker who is so often accused of having a naive theory of the perfect transparenca of the mind, is actually telling us that our emotional life as embodied creatures, as human beings, is subject to a serious and pervasive opacity (p. 210f.).

John Cottingham, Cartesian Trialism, Mind 94, 1985, 218-30.

(ohne weitere Seitenangaben.)

• siehe Vortrag über Enotionen.
• Kritik: Kenny.
• imagination and sense perception: their exercise requires physiological activity.
• doubting, understanding, affirming, denying and willing: can occur without any physiological events whatsoever.
• imagination: (1) requires effort, (2) is confused, 'useful'.
• three primitive notions: AT III 665.

Durch die Abgrenzung der imaginatio und sensatio von anderen Tätigkeiten des Geistes werden folgende Unterscheidungen möglich:

• Tier / Pflanze,Stein
• Mensch / verkörperter Engel

Offenbar erkennt Descartes diese Unterschiede an.

Die Rede von den drei Grundbegriffen ist nicht von einer Dreisubstanzen-Ontologie begleitet.