Book Cover -- Title -- Contents -- List of contributors -- Acknowledgements -- References to Descartes' works -- Introduction -- Mechanics and cosmology -- Descartes and the natural philosophy of the Coimbra commentaries -- Descartes' debt to Beeckman: inspiration, cooperation, conflict -- The foundational role of hydrostatics and statics in Descartes' natural philosophy -- Force, determination and impact -- A different Descartes: Descartes and the programme for a mathematical physics in his correspondence -- Causal powers and occasionalism from Descartes to Malebranche -- The invention of nature: Descartes and Regius -- The influence of Cartesian cosmology in England -- Method, optics, and the role of experiment -- Neo-Aristotle and method: between Zabarella and Descartes -- Figuring things out: figurate problem-solving in the early Descartes -- The rainbow: a privileged epistemological model -- Descartes opticien: the construction of the law of refraction and the manufacture of its physical rationales, 1618-29 -- A 'science for honntes hommes': La Recherche de la Verite and the deconstruction of experimental knowledge -- Descartes, experiments, and a first generation Cartesian, Jacques Rohault -- Physiology -- Cartesian physiology -- The resources of a mechanist physiology and the problem of goal-directed processes -- Btes-machines -- Descartes' cardiology and its reception in English physiology -- Imagination and representation -- Cartesian imagination and perspectival art -- From sparks of truth to the glow of possibility -- Descartes' theory of visual spatial perception -- Symposium on Descartes on perceptual cognition: introduction -- Descartes and formal signs -- Descartes' startling doctrine of the reverse-sign relation -- The role of inner objects in perception -- Descartes, Locke, and 'direct realism'.

Replies to my fellow symposiasts -- Mind and body, thought and sensation -- Descartes' intellectual and corporeal memories -- The senses as witnesses -- Descartes' naturalism about the mental -- Descartes and the corporeal mind: some implications of the Regius affair -- Perrault's criticisms of the Cartesian theory of the soul -- The body and the brain -- Life and health in Cartesian natural philosophy -- The texture of thought: why Descartes' Meditationes is meditational, and why it matters -- Bibliography -- Index.