ABSTRACT
The ontological status of forces in Descartes’ physical world is debated among Descartes scholars. The question of forces is embedded in another more general question, namely to determine which causal activity should be attributed to God and which causal activity should be attributed to bodies. Three distinct positions were attributed to Descartes in this respect: (1) he was an occasionalist, who attributed no causal power to bodies, so that forces, if they exist at all, are in God, (2) he was a pure conservationist, who attributed causal power to forces conceived as physical entities distinct from matter and motion, and (3) he was a concurrentist, who attributed causal activity both to God and to second causes in the material world, whether these second causes are forces or laws. These three interpretations seem to exhaust the possibilities. In this chapter, however, I defend another interpretation of Descartes’ position, according to which God intervenes in this world only to conserve it by his ordinary concurrence (in this it agrees with the conservationist interpretation), without, for all that, forces or laws being specific entities (in this it agrees with the occasionalist interpretation). This deflationist interpretation leads to downplaying the strong relationship which is assumed to exist between Descartes’ physics and his metaphysics.
