Descartes: Intuition and Memory

In this paper we intend to highlight the ambiguous relationship that we find in Descartes' early works between intuition and memory. This relationship is sometimes described as a distinction (intuition doesn't require memory) and sometimes as a competition (intuition may, in certain cases, serve as some sort of memory). We argue that this ambiguity is better understood when we acknowledge the intellectual context at the time of Descartes' early writings: the spreading in Europe of treaties dealing with the "art of memory" (ars memoriae), in both its rhetorical and epistemic dimensions. We show how Descartes attempted to move away from this tradition but also to challenge it, as it claimed to achieve the unity of sciences. Thus, the psychological distinctions that can be found in Descartes' Regulae best make sense within their epistemological background. Eventually, we reconsider the so-called Cartesian "dualism," which doesn't always limit itself to a strict distinction between what pertains to the body and what pertains to the soul, but enables a redoubling, in one's very mind, of a power that was thought to belong to mere physiology.