Anatomical Debates on Hearts and Brains and Philosophical Issues from Descartes’ Writing of L’Homme to its Posthumous Publications

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After describing Descartes’ medical library: “Vesalius and the others” and the writing of L’Homme, I emphasize the importance of anatomical knowledge and of the practice of dissections.

I discuss the gap between L’Homme and the Discours de la méthode. I investigate the reasons of such a discrepancy and insist on the crucial moment of late 1632 when Descartes wrote to Mersenne about his dissections of “the heads of various animals” in order “to explain what imagination, memory, etc., consist in.” In the same letter Descartes mentioned his reading of the De motu cordis by Harvey (AT I, 263, CSMK 40) a treatise on the movement of the heart also explaining another fundamental discovery: the circulation of the blood.

The anatomical problems Descartes had to face about hearts and brains provide the key to understanding the evolution of Descartes’ thoughts. They led him to introduce new themes in the Discours and the Dioptrique. The challenge of the motion of the heart shows the entanglement of metaphysical and medical themes. The anatomy of the brain, even more than the anatomy of the heart, has given rise to medical, philosophical, metaphysical and religious considerations and controversies. Descartes’ dissections of hearts and brains led to confront the problem of both the status and the location of the principle of life, and to consider the specificity of the human soul, and to pay attention to the unique mental faculties of imagination, reason and memory. These questions fitted in the framework of the Nature on Man, whose theme Descartes delved into in the Discours, the sixth Meditation, the Passions de l’âme and the Description du corps humain. The Description was published posthumously with L’Homme in 1664 in Paris with a Préface (Foreword) by Clerselier and Remarques by La Forge.