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Notes
1David Cunning, ‘True and Immutable Natures and Epistemic Progress in Descartes's Meditations’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 11 (2003) 235–48.
2For example, in John Edward Abbruzzese, ‘A Reply to Cunning on the Nature of True and Immutable Natures’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15 (2007) 155–67, and Willis Doney, ‘True and Immutable Natures’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12 (2005) 131–7. I focus on the criticisms in the former because I think that in the final analysis Professor Doney and I are not so far apart.
3I use ‘AT’ to refer to the pagination in Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Ouevres de Descartes, Volumes I–XII (Paris: Vrin, 1996). I use the translations in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1985); Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1984); and Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch and Anthony Kenny, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
4Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968) 150–6; and Anthony Kenny, ‘The Cartesian Circle and the Eternal Truths’, Journal of Philosophy, 67 (1970) 691–3.
5Tad Schmaltz, ‘Platonism and Descartes’ View of Immutable Essences', Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 73 (1991) 129–70.
6Lawrence Nolan, ‘The Ontological Status of Cartesian Natures’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 78 (1997) 169–94.
7See ‘To Mersenne, 16 October 1639’, AT 2: 597, and Fourth Replies, AT 7: 226. Of course, the same view is in Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Axiom 6.
8Or perhaps ‘some creature more noble than a body’ (AT 7: 79), to use the language of the Sixth Meditation.
9After offering his argument for the existence of material things in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes writes,
It follows that corporeal things exist. They may not all exist in a way that exactly corresponds with my sensory grasp of them, for in many cases the grasp of the senses is very obscure and confused. But at least they possess all the properties which I clearly and distinctly understand, that is, all those which, viewed in general terms, are comprised within the subject-matter of pure mathematics.
10Professor Abbruzzese barely notices my argument from Descartes's view that the true and immutable nature of X is just whatever it is to which our true idea of X conforms. He says (157) that I offer two reasons for my view – namely, the reasons that stem from (1) and (2) above. I spend only a few sentences on the argument from (1), for example, but a number of pages on the argument from Descartes's view on truth as conformity.
11‘Descartes on the Dubitability of the Existence of Self’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 74 (2007) 111–31; ‘Semel in Vita: Descartes’ Stoic View on the Place of Philosophy in Human Life’, Faith and Philosophy, 24 (2007) 164–83; ‘Descartes on Sensations and Ideas of Sensations’, An Anthology of Philosophical Studies, edited by P. Hanna, A. McEvoy, and P. Voutsina (Athens: Atiner Publishing, 2006) 17–32; ‘Rationalism and Education’, in A Companion to Rationalism, edited by Alan Nelson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 61–81; ‘Systematic Divergences in Malebranche and Cudworth’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42 (2003) esp. 356–7; ‘Descartes on the Immutability of the Divine Will’, Religious Studies, 39 (2003) 79–92; and ‘Descartes’ Modal Metaphysics', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2002), edited by Edward Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-modal.
12See, for example, Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies, AT 9A: 208, and Principles of Philosophy, ‘Preface to the French Edition’, AT 9B: 20. In the first, Descartes writes that
the thought of each person – i.e. the perception or knowledge which he has of something – should be for him the ‘standard which determines the truth of the thing’; in other words, all the judgements he makes about this thing must conform to his perception if they are to be correct … Although ignorant people would do well to follow the judgement of the more competent on matters which are difficult to know, it is still necessary that it be their own perception which tells them they are ignorant; they must also perceive that those whose judgement they want to follow are not as ignorant as they are, or else they would be wrong to follow them and would be behaving more like automatons and beasts than men.
See also Gary Hatfield, ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises’, in Essays on Descartes' Meditations, edited by Amelié Oksenberg (Rorty Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 47–9; and Leslie J. Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) 22–38.
13 Principles of Philosophy I: 71; AT 8A: 36; Principles of Philosophy I: 73; AT 8A: 37; and The World, Chapter Four, AT 11: 17, 21.
14 Principles of Philosophy I: 49–50, AT 8A: 23–4; Second Replies, AT 7: 156–7, 164; ‘Preface to the Reader’, AT 7: 9; the First Meditation, AT 7: 22; and Principles of Philosophy I: 72, AT 8A: 36–7.
15 Second Replies, AT 7: 130–1.
16 Principles of Philosophy I: 66–8, AT 8A: 32–3; Fourth Replies, AT 7: 232–5.
17 Principles of Philosophy I: 74, AT 8A: 37–8; Fifth Replies, AT 7: 385.
18 Principles of Philosophy I: 71, AT 8A: 36; Principles of Philosophy I: 66, AT 8A: 32.
19Note that in the 1639 letter to Mersenne Descartes says that the conception of truth as the conformity of thought with its object is so obvious that it need not even be stated (AT 2: 597), but the meditator would have become explicitly familiar with it in the Fourth Meditation, and early in the Third Mediation (AT 7: 37) when Descartes distinguishes between ideas that conform to reality and ideas that do not. Indeed, at AT 7: 38 Descartes says that ‘[m]y understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature’.
20A larger discussion of the views of Professors Kenny and Schmaltz is beyond the scope of this paper, but see also Nolan 1997, 171–2, and Cunning, ‘True and Immutable Natures and Epistemic Progress in Descartes' Meditations’, 236–7.
21See ‘To Clerselier, 23 April 1649’, AT 5: 356.
22See AT 7: 117 for Descartes's discussion.
23See also Second Replies, AT 7: 163–4, and Lawrence Nolan, ‘The Ontological Argument as an Exercise in Cartesian Therapy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 35 (2005) 521–62. Descartes also holds that if we know a demonstration well-enough, we grasp it just as easily as we do a self-evident intuition, and so in some cases the (Cartesian) distinction between knowing something through a demonstration and knowing it self-evidently will not be precise. See Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule 12, AT 10: 429–30.
24Clearly some if not most Third Meditation meditators proceed in this manner. The Fifth Meditation text reflects that there are some meditators who grasp the Fifth Meditation proof by the discrete steps of a demonstration (AT 7: 65, 67) and that there are others who (perhaps with a great deal of practice) grasp it as a single intuition.
25I have developed this reconstruction of the argument in work that is yet unpublished.
26See, for example, First Objections, AT 7: 99.
27Abbruzzese's view is also problematic in that it has the Fifth Meditation proof of God's existence dependent on the Third Meditation argument, and so is circular as well. (See John Edward Abbruzzese, ‘The Structure of Descartes's Ontological Proof’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15 (2007) 253–82.) Descartes himself makes terribly clear that the Fifth Meditation argument is a free-standing argument that he is offering to those who were not able to follow the arguments of the Third Meditation. (See for example First Replies, AT 7: 120; Second Replies, AT 7: 163–4, 136; and also the Fifth Meditation, where Descartes refers to the ‘already amply demonstrated truth rule’ (AT 7, 65) and says that even if he had not demonstrated it, and even if ‘it turned out that not everything on which I have meditated in these past days is true’, he would still be able to proceed with the proof of God's existence (AT 7: 65–6). Of course, Descartes himself does not reject the argumentation of the Third and Fourth Meditations. He is a teacher, and a teacher who appreciates that not all of his students are of the same mind. See Seventh Replies, AT 7: 482, and Fifth Replies, AT 7: 350, 355–6). Finally, note that another advantage of the view that I am offering is that it makes straightforwardly clear the way in which the discussion of geometrical properties is the background and set-up for the Fifth Meditation proof of the existence of God.
28This is a constant refrain throughout Descartes's corpus, but see, for example, the Sixth Meditation (AT 7: 80, 82–3), the Second Meditation discussion of wax, and Principles of Philosophy Parts II–IV.
29See also Nolan 1997, 176.
30There are other passages in which Descartes goes out of his way to highlight the reality or being of non-sensible things, presumably because his beginning meditator is inclined to affirm that things are real only to the extent that they are sensible. See for example the Second Meditation, AT 7: 27–9, and also the passages cited in n13.
31See, for example, the Third Meditation:
whether it is a goat or a chimera that I am imagining, it is just as much true that I imagine the former as the latter … [E]ven if the things which I may desire are wicked or even non-existent, that does not make it any less true that I desire them.
Descartes does make the claim that false ideas ‘arise from nothing’ (AT 7, 44), and some commentators have argued that that claim entails that false ideas have no objective reality (assuming Descartes's view that something cannot come from nothing). (See, for example, Margaret Wilson, Descartes, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978: 111.) Immediately after saying that false ideas ‘arise from nothing’, Descartes elaborates: ‘that is, they are in me only because of a deficiency and lack of perfection in my nature’ (AT 7, 44). He is not saying that false ideas have no cause but that they exist as a result of our lack of perfection: we take simple ideas and then combine them into composite ideas that do not have a corresponding existent. Presumably he is just anticipating his Fourth Meditation view that falsity and error are due to our reckless acts of volition and our participation in non-being. See Alan Nelson, ‘The Falsity in Sensory Ideas: Descartes and Arnauld’, in Interpreting Arnauld, edited by E. Kremer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) 13–32; and Dan Kaufman, ‘Descartes on the Objective Reality of Materially False Ideas’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 81 (2000) 399–403.
34AT 8A: 31–2. See also the AT 4: 350 passage in which Descartes says that part of what it is for a thing's essence and existence to be conceptually distinct is for them to be ‘in no way [nullo modo]’ distinct in reality.
32Professor Abbruzzese repeats the objection (162).
33A systematic defense of the inseparability reading is in Paul Hoffman, ‘Descartes's Theory of Distinction’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64 (2002) 57–78. See also Justin Skirry, ‘Descartes's Conceptual Distinction and Its Ontological Import’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42 (2004) 121–44.
35See Lawrence Nolan, ‘Reductionism and Nominalism in Descartes's Theory of Attributes’, Topoi, 16 (1997) 129–40, Lawrence Nolan, ‘Descartes' Theory of Universals’, Philosophical Studies, 89 (1998) 161–80, and also Alan Nelson ‘Attributes and the Perception of Substance’ (unpublished paper presented at the 2007 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association). In the texts themselves Descartes says that in reality a thing is nothing other than its nature, and so presumably the motivation for locating a competing interpretation is that there is some worry about attributing to Descartes a view in which there can be a distinction between things in thought but no corresponding distinction in reality. But it is certainly possible to allow Descartes to have the view that he says he has. As a matter of methodology we should presumably proceed along the lines suggested by Nadler (in Steven Nadler, ‘Malebranche's Occasionalism: A Reply to Clarke’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 33 (1995) 506): if a figure's system entails a view that we find it difficult to comprehend, and if the figure explicitly embraces the view, we should allow the figure to have it, rather than force an interpretation that we might think is more charitable.
36Professor Doney also argues (137) that I engage in ‘questionable’ reasoning when I isolate tenets of Descartes's system that entail that a thing and its nature are identical in re, and then conclude that Descartes therefore accepts that a thing and its nature are identical in re. Of course, Descartes might be committed to views that he does not explicitly embrace. I am assuming that his claim that in re the nature of a thing is no other than the thing, and his claim that in re a thing's nature just is the thing itself, are evidence that he explicitly embraces the view. But I also make an attempt to isolate those of his systematic tenets that entail it.
38Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Preliminary Discourse, in Ann Thomson, Machine Man and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 156.
37See, for example, Plato, Republic, Book VII, 515c–516b; Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book I, ll. 931–48, translated and edited by Anthony M. Esolen Baltimore (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 51; Nicholas Malebranche, preface to Elucidations, in The Search After Truth and Elucidations of the Search After Truth, translated and edited by Thomas Lennon and Paul Oscamp, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 539–40; Benedict Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, in Spinoza: Complete Works, translated by Samuel Shirley and edited by Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 2002), chapter thirteen, 512; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, translated by John Beversluis, in C. G. Luckhardt, Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) 61.
40 Principles of Philosophy I: 75, AT 8A: 38–9. Of course, practice is required to ensure that we continue to see our pre-reflective confusions for what they are. See ‘To Princess Elizabeth, 15 September 1645’, AT 4: 295–6.
39For example, at the end of the Meditations the meditator does not take his First Meditation opinion about the sensory origin of his beliefs as a reason for rejecting the considered view that the perception of a body always involves an act of purely mental scrutiny. Nor will he consider his muddled First Meditation assessment that it is possible that God is a deceiver (or that He may not exist at all) to count against the clear thinking that entails that God exists and cannot deceive.
41See also the Third Meditation, AT 7: 42, 51–2; the Fourth Meditation, AT 7: 53; Seventh Replies, AT 7: 481; Principles of Philosophy I: 49–50, AT 8A: 23–4; Principles of Philosophy II: 21, AT 8A: 52; and Rules for the Direction of the Mind, AT 10: 457–8, 409, 451.
42The complete discussion of these matters is in my unpublished book manuscript, Argument and Persuasion in Descartes' Meditations.