Cartesian Physics: A New Book

A new book by Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore offers us a view of Descartes' philosophy of the material world, the hypothetical PHYSICS within his metaphysics, that is more sympathetic than many of the other recent takes on it.

Here's a link to a review by John Carriero, of UCLA.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/descartes-and-the-ontology-of-everyday-life/

Carriero starts by discussing the Cartesian view of everyday objects. Since extension is the essence of matter, space and matter are one and the same. But for Descartes types of matter differentiate themselves by size. Some are very small, and here Descartes allows for such microscopic realities as may in the course of time be discovered, though he didn't accept atomism -- the idea that there is an absolutely bottom rung of the ladder of scale. Some objects, those of everyday life, are medium size, large globules, and these include the bodies from within which your soul and mine look out at the world. Some objects are really big -- planets and stars.

All diversity, strangeness, and beauty in the world is due to motion, rest, and these differences of scale. And things cause each other to move by pushing each other around. There is no action at a distance. The way things circle one another is an artifact of the simplicity of the circle, or a "vortex," as Descartes liked to say. Objects pushing each other around tend to fall into circular patterns, and the moon circles the earth for no reason other than this.

It sounds depressingly reductionistic to many. Apparently not to Brown or Normore, though.