Brown, Deborah J. 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born 1963. Education: University of Queensland, B.A. (with honours); University of Toronto, M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of Queensland, Forgan Smith E338, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. E-mail—deborah.brown@uq.edu.au.

CAREER:

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, senior lecturer in philosophy, director of honours (HPRC), member of the Federation of University Women Scholarships Committee.

WRITINGS:

Descartes and the Passionate Mind, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

In Descartes and the Passionate Mind, philosophy professor Deborah J. Brown suggests an interpretation of the works of the great seventeenth-century French philosopher that undoes the popular understanding of Descartes's work. Rene Descartes (1596-1650), in his Meditations on First Philosophy and Passions of the Soul, created two different versions of how the body, mind, and soul interact with one another. Most readers accept Descartes's statement in the Discourse on the Method, cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’) as evidence that the philosopher was primarily concerned with the nature and existence of Mind—the first thing that Descartes could not doubt existed. But at the time Descartes rejected the evidence of the senses—which arrived through the unreliable body. "According to the longstanding interpretation," wrote Matthew Lauzon in the H-France Review, "Descartes is responsible for splitting the self in two and treating a spiritual mind as if it can operate most effectively when divorced from an interfering material body." Instead, Lauzon continued, "Brown argues that, contrary to conventional readings, Descartes developed a coherent theory of the integrated self for whom not only is embodiment not an impediment to the mind, it is crucial to rational action, acquiring scientific knowledge, understanding causality, and the benefits of social relations."

The question of the relationship between mind and body was particularly significant for Descartes because of his extensive correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. They exchanged letters for a period of seven years, from 1643 until his death in 1650, and it was she who stated the key question that led to the composition of the Passions of the Soul: if mind and body are separate, how can they influence each other? His answer was that mind (self-awareness and consciousness) was not the same thing as brain (the organ in the head), but that they interacted through the pineal gland, a small gland imbedded in the brain. "Mind-body unity is addressed briefly but significantly in Part Six of the Meditations on First Philosophy," stated Pamela Kraus in the Review of Metaphysics, "and scholars have recognized that the themes of this part connect with themes in the Passions of the Soul. Brown elaborates some of those themes and tries to show that the Cartesian mind is ‘passionate’; indeed it must be if we are to act in the practical realm."

The significance of this interpretation, as Tatiana Patrone explained on the Metapsychology Online Reviews, is that it changes the nature of the debate on what Cartesian philosophy actually asserts. "The key to understanding Descartes' theory of the mind, Brown argues, is in reading his Passions of the Soul in addition to the Meditation on First Philosophy. The Passions not only provides the missing view that supplements Descartes' mind-body theory, but also constitute the appropriate context for the Meditations, the context without which Descartes' project is easily misconstrued and sounds rather implausible. The thing to do, Brown argues, is to ‘start with Descartes' conception of the whole human [as it is presented in the Passions] and to work back to the concept of the mind we find in the early Meditations.’" "The union of mind and body," Lisa Shapiro declared in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review, "starts from the challenge of understanding the human capacity for thought in the face of a natural world conceived mechanistically. Human beings do think, understand and have knowledge; we have minds. But we are no angels: we have two feet squarely planted on the ground; we are embodied. And bodies, as parts of nature, are like machines. Descartes's question, and ours both in understanding him and in wrestling with a similar question in contemporary philosophy, is how to reconcile human mindedness with human embodiedness."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

H-France Review, June, 2007, Matthew Lauzon, review of Descartes and the Passionate Mind.

Notre Dame Philosophical Review, March 4, 2007, Lisa Shapiro, review of Descartes and the Passionate Mind.

Renaissance Quarterly, winter, 2007, "Descartes's Theory of Action."

Review of Metaphysics, September, 2007, Pamela Kraus, review of Descartes and the Passionate Mind, p. 122.

Times Literary Supplement, March 23, 2007, "Through the Trees," p. 30.

ONLINE

Metapsychology Online Reviews,http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/ (March 20, 2008), Tatiana Patrone, review of Descartes and the Passionate Mind.

University of Queensland School of History, Philosophy, Religion & Classics Web site,http://www.uq.edu.au/ (March 20, 2008), "Dr. Deborah Brown."