Selected Publications

Books

2001 Spirits and Clocks. Organism and Machine in Descartes. Cornell University Press, 2001.
2000 Life’s Form. Late Aristotelian Theories of the Soul. Cornell University Press, 2000.
1996  Physiologia. Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Philosophy. Cornell University Press, 1996.

Co-authored Books

2003 Roger Ariew, ed.; Dennis Des Chene, Douglas M. Jesseph, Tad M. Schmaltz, Theo Verbeek. Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. Lanham, MD; Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003.

Articles

— “Suárez on media”. To be published in a volume based on the conference at Western Ontario (see below).
— “Using the passions”. To be published in a volume based on the conference “Early modern theories of the passions” (UBC 2008, see below).
2008  “Imagined machines and the real world”. In: Ludger Schwarte et al., eds., Theatrum machinarum. Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Also in German translation in the German version of the same work.
2007 “Forms of art in Jesuit Aristotelianism (with a coda on Descartes)”. In William Newman and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, eds., The Artificial and the Natural: An Ancient Debate and its Modern Descendants (MIT, 2007).
2007  “Abstracting from the soul: the mechanics of locomotion”. In Jessica Riskin, ed., Genesis redux. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
2006  “Descartes reduced: review essay on Desmond Clarke’s Descartes’ theory of mind”. Oxford studies in early modern philosophy 3 (2006).
2006  ‘Animal’ as Concept: Bayle’s “Rorarius”. In Justin Smith, ed., The Problem of Animal Generation in Modern Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
2005  “Aristotelian natural philosophy”. In Donald Rutherford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
2004 “Mechanisms of life in the seventeenth century”. Studies in the history and philosophy of biology 36 (2005):245–260. (Special issue edited by Carl Craver and Lindley Darden)
2003 “Life after Descartes: Régis on Generation”. Perspectives on Science 11 (2003):410–420.

Research Interests

Prof. Des Chene's research concerns the history of philosophy, especially early modern. He has published on natural philosophy and the sciences of life in the seventeenth century. More recently he has been working on theories of the passions and on animals and automata. Other interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, especially of music, and the history and philosophy of mathematics.