Descartes's Concept of Mind

“Descartes’s Concept of Mind is a book of high quality. The main point of the project is to detail Descartes’s theory of the embodiment of the human mind. This is a neglected side of his thought, and Alanen treats it in an illuminating way. The exposition is clear and remarkably well informed. And she persuasively shows that Descartes had a complicated and interesting view of this matter.”—John Carriero, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles

“Alanen takes the embodied Cartesian mind as her central topic, and it is refreshing to read an account of Descartes’ psychology that treats his famous argument for the real distinction between mind and body only in passing… Alanen’s account of how notions of will and agency become internalized in Descartes, and the important differences between the Cartesian account of the will as agent and Aristotelian accounts of the will as that in virtue of which a human being is an agent, is interesting and illuminating.”—Antonia Lolordo, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences