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Descartes and the First Cartesians

passage which has given rise to this debate among modern commentators clearly shows that “the ‘nature of time’ is not the central concern of this passage” (126). Moreover, he makes no attempt to refute the surely correct claims of Jorge Secada and Daniel Garber that Descartes “had no demonstrable interest in these questions at all” (127). These examples are symptomatic of the whole – in the end, the author’s insistence on the importance of concepts of time remains unproven. Perhaps a better case could have been made by choosing other thinkers. It seems strange to focus on Descartes and Hobbes, whose natural philosophies (at least) were so close to one another. The author tries to make much of the role of time in Hobbes’ political philosophy: “This vision of man as a temporal animal underpinned his theory of the state” (163). Unlike J. G.A. Pocock, however, Edwards shows no interest in the eschatological ideas of Hobbes and his thoughts on eternity, and so his discussion seems to miss the main point of Hobbes’ concern with time. But, instead of Descartes and Hobbes, why not consider two thinkers whose general philosophical positions differed markedly – such as Newton and Leibniz, or Henry More and Spinoza? And if the relationship between time and the soul is the main focus, why not concentrate on works with built-in psychological interests, such as Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy? Or why not concentrate on one of the many theological works about the nature of the soul? In the end, then, this is a book for specialists – it will be important reading for those who are interested in the relationship between time and the “science of the soul” in the late scholastics, or in Descartes, or Hobbes, but it will be of very limited appeal for those who do not share the author’s focus.