ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates three aspects of Descartes’s greatness: his comprehensive corpuscularian physics; his adaptation of various genres of writing to his conceptions of method and to the content of his metaphysics; and his fundamental contributions to how an embodied mind might perceive and feel. He envisioned a system of the world as constituted from material corpuscles having only the properties of size, shape, position, and motion. He extended this account to an embodied physiological psychology. He developed different types of supporting arguments: at first, empirical arguments from unity and simplicity of explanation; then, an epistemology of the pure intellect. Noted for attention to method, he was sensitive to the literary form of his writings and he forged a systematic unity among style, method, and metaphysical content in adopting a meditative mode of writing for his Meditations.
