Géraud de Cordemoy

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Géraud de Cordemoy (1626–1684)

Géraud de Cordemoy (born October 6, 1626 in Paris , † October 15, 1684 ibid) was a French philosopher.

He is considered a strict Cartesian and representative of occassionalism . As such, he also represented atomism and influenced the French philosophers of materialism.

Life

As the only son of the Paris university teacher Géraud de Cordemoy and his wife Nicole, he was the third of four children. At the age of nine he lost his father. He studied law and made a living as a lawyer. From the beginning of the 1660s he attended the philosophical circles in Paris and met the physicist Jacques Rohault , who inspired him to write the first writings on the mind-body problem. In 1664 the Discours de l'áction des corps (discourse on body movements) appeared, in 1668 the Discours physique de la parole (discourse on the physics of speech), with which he became famous. Molière took him as a model for the figure of the philosophy teacher in the bourgeois Gentilhomme .

He worked on a history of France that his eldest son Louis-Gérauld was only able to complete and publish in 1685–1689. De Cordemoy was director of the Académie française and teacher of the future King Louis XV from 1675 .

Works (selection)

Individual works
  • Discours de l'áction des corps . Jacques Le Gras, Paris 1664.
  • The Discernement du corps et de l'âme en six discours pour servir à l'eclaircissement de la physique . Paris 1666.
  • Discours physique de la parole . Paris 1668.
  • Copie d'une lettre ecrite à un sçavant religieux de la Compagnie de Jésus . Remy, Paris 1704 (reprint of the Paris 1668 edition).
  • A Philosophical Discourse Concerning Speech . Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Delmar, NY 1972 (reprint of ed. 1668).
  • Divers Traitez de metaphysique, d'histoire, et de politique . Paris 1691.
  • Andreas Scheib (Ed.): Selected texts on the body-soul problem . Klostermann, Frankfurt / M. 2003, ISBN 978-3-465-03248-9 .
Work editions
  • Pierre Clair, François Girbal: (Ed.): Œuvres philosophiques . Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1968.

Literature (selection)

  • Fred Ablondi: Gerauld de Cordemoy. Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian . Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, Wis. 2005, ISBN 0-87462-667-6 (Marquette studies in philosophy; 44).
  • Jean-François Battail: L'avocat philosophe Géraud de Cordemoy (1626-1684) . M. Nijhoff, The Hague 1973, ISBN 90-247-1542-3 .
  • Noam Chomsky : Cartesian Linguistics. A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought . University Press, Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-70817-3 (reprint of New York 1966 edition).
  • Thomas M. Lennon: Occasionalism and the Cartesian Metaphysic of Motion . In: Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Suppl. 1 (1974), pp. 29-40.
  • Steven Nadler: Cordemoy and Occasionalism . In: Journal of the History of Philosophy , Vol. 43 (2005), pp. 37-54.
  • Joseph Prost: Essai sur l'atomisme et l'occasionalisme dans la philosophie cartésienne : Paulin, Paris 1907.
  • Andreas Scheib: On the theory of individual substances in Géraud de Cordemoy. Frankfurt / Main 1997.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cordemoy, Géraud de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1626
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1684
Place of death Paris