ON THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL - Les Passions de L'Ame by Descartes, Rene - 1650

Paris: Jean Guinard, 1650. Second edition.

SCARCE 1650 PRINTING OF DESCARTES' LAST PUBLISHED WORK--ON THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL RESULTING FROM OUR ANIMAL SPIRITS.

6 1/4 inches tall volume, vellum binding, [2], [46], 286 pp, browning to covers and page edges, old water stains top edge, scattered light foxing, very good minus.

RENE DESCARTES (1596 – 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Many elements of Descartes' philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In PASSIONS OF THE SOUL (Les passions de l'âme), the last of Descartes' published work, completed in 1649 and dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, the author contributes to a long tradition of theorizing "the passions." The passions were experiences often equated with or labeled as precursors to what are commonly called "emotions" in the Modern period. In the Passions of the Soul, Descartes defines these phenomena as follows: "[P]erceptions or sensations or excitations of the soul which are referred to it in particular and which are caused, maintained, and strengthened by some movement of the spirits." The "spirits" mentioned here are the "animal spirits" central to Descartes's account of physiology. They function similarly to how the medical establishment now understands the nervous system. Descartes explains that the animal spirits are produced by the blood and are responsible for stimulating the body's movement. By affecting the muscles, for example, the animal spirits "move the body in all the different ways in which it can be moved." The bibliography of this work is complicated. First published in French by Elsevier in Amsterdam in 1649, it then appeared under five different Paris imprints, most of which are scarce, in 1650. No chronological precedence appears to have been established for which of these would be, in effect, the first printing of the French edition of 'Les Passions' in France. Library holdings bear out that the 1650 imprints are scarce.