ABSTRACT
On a broadly Aristotelian view prominent in scholasticism, animal cognition depends crucially on the causal contact with the material world provided by sensation. This chapter presents the survey of scholastic treatments of the causality involved in sensory cognition as well as the alternative view that found in Rene Descartes. The scholastic account of sensory cognition has its source in Aristotle’s hylomophic conception of animals. It is Descartes’ identification of matter with extension that provides the primary basis for his rejection of a scholastic account of sensory cognition. There was in fact relatively little discussion of Augustine among French Cartesians in the decade or so following Descartes’ death in 1650. Though Cordemoy had an impeccable Cartesian pedigree, his Discernement begins by defending a rather anti-Cartesian position. The indication in Cordemoy that not even our sensations can render certain of the existence of bodies is part of an “idealist” development in post-Descartes Cartesianism.
