UNION OF MIND AND BODY. Descartes holds that the human mind and its body together form a union. In the philosophical vocabulary of his period, union can be said to hold between any things that form a unity; since things can be said to be one in many ways, there are many sorts of union (Rudolph Goclenius, Lexicon s.v.). The union between soul and body is, according to Aristotelian authors, real, physical, and substantial: the soul is the substantial form of the body, with which it forms one complete substance.
On this question Descartes agrees with the Aristotelians. The soul is comparable to a substantial form insofar as it “gives being” to the body (by unifying its many parts into one thing) and yields a single thing—a human being. The unity of soul and body in the human being is the highest degree of unity that distinct substances can enter into. Our evidence for the union consists in the causal relations between soul and body whose existence we infer with moral certainty from experience (Principles II, art. 2) and in the influence of the passions on the will, which produces in us a solicitude for our own body that we do not have for any other (Sixth Meditation).
Descartes’s physics made substantial forms superfluous, and his analogy therefore unpersuasive. Few subsequent authors accepted the doctrine of union in the version proposed by him. Even Pierre-Sylvain Régis treats the relation as one of mutual dependence in action.
UNIVERSALS. A universal is a property or quality that many individuals may share. Thus, in addition to the many red things in the world there is the property of redness, or the quality of being red. More abstract properties, such as justice, and abstract mathematical objects such as numbers are also typically taken to be universals. A standard philosophical problem arises concerning the ontological status of universals—do they exist outside of our thought, or is their reality purely linguistic or conceptual? Descartes held that universals were merely modes of thought, with no extra-mental reality; as he put it in article 58 of Part I of the Principles: “Number and all universals are only modes of thought” (AT, vol. VIIIA, p. 27). Cartesian universals are not an object of the senses, but rather the intellect, which arrives at them by a process of abstraction from particular cases. This process of abstraction involves the consideration of common features (and differences) among individuals, whose ultimate result is that “five universals are commonly reckoned, namely, genus, species, difference, property, accident” (AT, vol. VIIIA, p. 28).
UTRECHT, UNIVERSITY OF. The University of Utrecht was founded in 1636, after the Universities of Leiden, Franeker, and Groningen, which were founded in 1575, 1581, and 1619 respectively, but before the University of Harderwijk, which was founded in 1648. Started as an “illustrious school” (an institution for higher education, which is not allowed to confer academic degrees) in 1634, it had from the beginning a civic character, being governed and funded by the municipal government. Among its first professors were Henricus Reneri (philosophy), Antonius Aemilius (history), and Gysbertus Voetius (theology). Although Reneri is often seen as the first Cartesian, it is more correct to describe him as an eclectic. In 1639 at his funeral, however, Aemilius, who pronounced the funeral oration, caused great unease by mixing into his speech a eulogy of Descartes. The terms in which he praised Descartes and his philosophy presumably were a reason for Voetius to include, without naming Descartes for that matter, a few warnings against the exaggerated expectations some people had with respect to certain new philosophies. The disappointment he anticipated could only lead to skepticism, which in turn was the main condition for atheism. The first Cartesian to be appointed to the University was in fact Henricus Regius, who became a professor “extra ordinem” (today we would probably say “associate professor”) in theoretical medicine in 1638.
Although a series of disputations submitted by Regius in the spring of 1641 caused some suspicions, nothing serious happened before December 8, when Regius submitted a series of propositions, one to the effect that man is an accidental being, because body as well as mind are complete substances, and another defending the Copernican hypothesis on the motion of the Earth.
For the theologians, who became increasingly irritated by Regius’s attacks on Aristotle, this was obviously the last straw. Voetius, at that point rector of the university and already an authority in Orthodox theology, added to a disputation planned for December 18 a gravamen in which the idea that man is an accidental being is implied to be atheist, or at least to favor atheism; the heliocentric hypothesis is proclaimed to be contrary to biblical evidence; and the rejection of “substantial forms” (one of the principal concepts of the Neo-Aristotelian philosophy usually taught in the 17th century) is considered to be dangerous and premature. Further objections, which were detailed in a letter of the theologians to their colleagues of other faculties, were that without Aristotelian philosophy it became impossible to teach theology; that without knowing the technical terms of Aristotelian philosophy, students would not be able to participate in the academic debate; and that students from Utrecht would find it more difficult to obtain a job.
Thanks to the intervention of Gysbertus van der Hoolck, a Utrecht burgomaster, who on behalf of the municipal government was more particularly in charge of matters regarding the university but who also was a personal friend of Descartes, the theologians toned down their intervention but, after the disputation had taken place on December 18, Voetius added a small treatise on “substantial forms,” which he submitted for disputation on December 23 and 24. The burgomasters, on the other hand, asked the Senate (the assembly of professors) to write a memorandum on the limits which philosophy teaching would have to respect. Apparently, they hoped to arrive at a strict demarcation between the faculties of theology and philosophy.
While all this was happening, Regius, helped by Descartes, prepared a “Response to Voetius” (Responsio), which was published in February. It amounted to a clumsy attempt to turn the tables on Voetius by showing that the greatest threat to traditional theology is the doctrine of substantial forms, rather than the philosophy of Descartes. The result was not only that Regius was relegated to the Faculty of Medicine, but also that the Senate, headed by their rector, Voetius, obtained permission to issue a judgment on the new philosophy, by which they not only dissociated from Regius but also voiced their reservations on the new philosophy. Descartes, on the other hand, took advantage of the delay in the printing of the second edition of the Meditations to include a “Letter to Father Dinet,” in which he complained about the slow and hesitant reaction of the Jesuit order to his philosophy (Jacques Dinet was provincial of the Jesuits in the Île-de-France) and gave a detailed report on the crisis in Utrecht. More particularly, he accused Voetius, whom he saw as the real author of the judgment, of misusing his position as rector of the university to settle a personal account with Regius. Finally, he included a vitriolic portrait of Voetius as a person of limited intellectual abilities and someone with a quarrelsome nature, who by preaching against the rich and the worldly actually undermined the position of the authorities.
Not surprisingly, Voetius did not take this well. He asked Martinus Schoock to take his defense, which Schoock did by writing a book that would be known as “The Admirable Method of René Descartes” (Admiranda methodus, 1643). Before it was even completely printed Descartes got hold of the first part of the proofs. He wrote a reply in the form of an open letter to Voetius (Epistola ad Voetium, 1643, also published in a Dutch translation), which caused new trouble. Indeed, Voetius managed to have the tables turned on Descartes, who was now accused of libel. A lawsuit followed but was stopped after an intervention of the stadtholder. Descartes turned his attention to Schoock in Groningen and, through an intervention of the French ambassador, filed a complaint with the States of Groningen—not only to the upper judicial authority of the province, but also to the highest governors of the University. In his highly ambiguous declaration before the academic tribunal Schoock put all the blame on Voetius: he was the real author of Admiranda methodus; all Schoock had done was to give it its final form. But Descartes’s attempt to use this outcome for building a new case against Voetius failed. A letter to the Utrecht municipality remained unanswered. A long and formal request to reopen the case, which Descartes sent in two languages (Dutch and French) in 1648 and in which he gave a report of his dealings with Voetius, was filed but did not lead to any action—it was published posthumously in a Latin translation in 1656 and is now known as Lettre apologétique aux Magistrats d’Utrecht.
Still, if abstraction is made from the personal feelings of bitterness Descartes may have had about how things developed, it becomes clear that the situation of Cartesian philosophy in Utrecht was not excessively bad. Not only did Regius continue to teach Cartesian ideas in the Medical Faculty; few people outside the Theological Faculty had much sympathy with Voetius. And although Voetius managed to have his two sons, Paulus (1619–67) and Daniel (1630–60), appointed reader in metaphysics, in 1652 the administrators appointed the Cartesian Johannes de Bruyn (1620–75) to the chair of philosophy. Moreover, the vacancy left by the early death of Daniel Voetius in 1660 was filled by Regnerus van Mansvelt, a representative of the new ideas. Finally, in 1663 the administration appointed Frans Burman (1628–79), a prominent representative of Coccejan theology who openly sympathized with Cartesianism, to counterbalance the influence of Voetius. It was only after the political crisis of 1672 (when with the help of the Church and the people William III took power), the occupation by the French troops (which exacted a levy from the town that impoverished it for many years), and the appointment of the very traditional Gerard de Vries as primary professor of philosophy, that reaction set in and that the University of Utrecht became one of the most anti-Cartesian of the Netherlands.