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Descartes and the Possibility of Science

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Descartes and the Possibility of Science describes the intellectual structure of modern science as a body of knowledge produced by the Cartesian method. For Des-cartes, science was possible only because of certain features of the very nature of human beings. Schouls focuses on two largely neglected aspects of Descartes' position: the intellectual imagina-tion and free will. Joining these top-ics together within the context of Cartesian doctrine, Schouls opens up a substantially new reading of the Meditations and a more complete picture of Descartes as a scientist. This revisioning of science follows from Schouls' previous study Descartes and the Enlightenment that considers how the philosopher's rationalism became a principle ingredient in the ideological hegemony of Enlightenment reason. In Descartes and the Possibility of Science Schouls asserts that Descartes viewed the intellectual imagination, the source of hypotheses, as crucial to the development of scientific thought. Descartes placed consider-able emphasis on mental power in his discussion of the paths by which humans were to proceed in science, from pure to applied disciplines. Schouls explores the roles of differ-ent kinds of imagination in meta-physics, in pure physics or geome-try, and in the applied sciences. He inquires further that, for Descartes, free will was also indispensable in the pursuit of knowledge. Without it, the scientific enterprise could neither start nor continue. Descartes and the Possibility of Science closes with a discussion of the metaphysi-cal bases of free will, intellectual imagination, and other human functions necessary to the advance-ment of science.