Descartes's ontology of thought (original) (raw)
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Descartes on Will and Suspension of Judgment: Affectivity of the Reasons for Doubt
Boros, Gábor; Szalai, Judit & Tóth, Olivér István (eds.): The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy, Eötvös University Press, 2017
In this paper, I join the so-called voluntarism debate on Descartes’s theory of will and judgment, arguing for an indirect doxastic voluntarism reading of Descartes, as opposed to a classic, or direct doxastic voluntarism. More specifically, I examine the question whether Descartes thinks the will can have a direct and full control over one’s suspension of judgment. Descartes was a doxastic voluntarist, maintaining that the will has some kind of control over one’s doxastic states, such as belief and doubt. According to a long-held reading, the control that the will has over doxastic states in Descartes’s theory is direct; the doxastic states are affected by the mere act of will. This reading is called direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV), or direct voluntarism (DV) for short, and it states that we are capable of assenting, rejecting and suspending a judgment based only on our will to do so. Thus, these actions would be utterly and merely volitional. DV can be divided into two further positions, direct positive voluntarism (+DV) and direct negative voluntarism (-DV). Direct positive voluntarism deals with the act of forming judgments, maintaining that one can accept or deny a proposition wilfully and either merely believe or not believe something voluntarily. Direct negative voluntarism deals with the suspension of judgment, maintaining that it can likewise be accomplished by a simple act of will. However, I support an alternate account of Descartes’s voluntarism, which is called indirect doxastic voluntarism (IDV), or indirect voluntarism (IV) for short. By this account, the will is capable of affecting a doxastic state indirectly by making one concentrate on essential tasks for forming that state, such as gathering up and paying attention to strong reasons and evidence. IV is also possible to divide into indirect positive voluntarism (+IV) and indirect negative voluntarism (-IV). Per indirect positive voluntarism the will needs to pay attention to reasons for accepting or denying some proposition. Likewise, by indirect negative voluntarism, in order to suspend judgment the will needs to direct this attention to the reasons for doubt. By attending to these reasons, the will also comes face-to-face with its own freedom. This feeling of freedom can be described as affectivity of the reasons for belief (assent) and doubt (suspension).
"Descartes without Clear and Distinct Ideas. A Proposal", Dianoia 34 (2022), 31-48.
The article advances a reading of Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy that dispenses with "clear and distinct ideas". Since Descartes's lifetime, these concepts have become a trademark of his philosophy and a target for his critics, on account of their vagueness and inconsistency. The article provides evidence that, by and large, "clear and distinct ideas" were intended by Descartes to convey in simpler, catchier terms a much more elaborate argument, ultimately grounded on the system of the mind's faculties. The article argues that, through this enquiry, Descartes meant to provide a space of reasons wherein to establish key contentions of his philosophy, to include those involving the existence of both mind and bodies. The article concludes by showing that the traditional portrayal of Descartes as an unmitigated intuitionist is, at best, one-sided.
In this paper, I join the so-called voluntarism debate on Descartes’s theory of will and judgment, arguing for an indirect doxastic voluntarism reading of Descartes, as opposed to a classic, or direct doxastic voluntarism. More specifically, I examine the question whether Descartes thinks the will can have a direct and full control over one’s suspension of judgment. Descartes was a doxastic voluntarist, maintaining that the will has some kind of control over one’s doxastic states, such as belief and doubt. According to a long-held reading, the control that the will has over doxastic states in Descartes’s theory is direct; the doxastic states are affected by the mere act of will. This reading is called direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV), or direct voluntarism (DV) for short, and it states that we are capable of assenting, rejecting and suspending a judgment based only on our will to do so. Thus, these actions would be utterly and merely volitional. DV can be divided into two further positions, direct positive voluntarism (+DV) and direct negative voluntarism (-DV). Direct positive voluntarism deals with the act of forming judgments, maintaining that one can accept or deny a proposition willfully and either merely believe or not believe something voluntarily. Direct negative voluntarism deals with the suspension of judgment, maintaining that it can likewise be accomplished by a simple act of will. However, I support an alternate account of Descartes’s voluntarism, which is called indirect doxastic voluntarism (IDV), or indirect voluntarism (IV) for short. By this account, the will is capable of affecting a doxastic state indirectly by making one concentrate on essential tasks for forming that state, such as gathering up and paying attention to strong reasons and evidence. IV is also possible to divide into indirect positive voluntarism (+IV) and indirect negative voluntarism (-IV). Per indirect positive voluntarism the will needs to pay attention to reasons for accepting or denying some proposition. Likewise, by indirect negative voluntarism, in order to suspend judgment the will needs to direct this attention to the reasons for doubt. By attending to these reasons, the will also comes face-to-face with its own freedom. This feeling of freedom can be described as affectivity of the reasons for belief (assent) and doubt (suspension)
Descartes: Ideas and the Mark of the Mental
Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse, 2000
Although Cartesian scholars rarely agree on even the most fundamental aspects of Descartes' theory of ideas-e. g., what ideas are, how they represent, what clarity or material falsity are-almost all of them agree that Descartes creates a novel manner of understanding the mental in terms of cognitive transparency. 1 This is an interpretation of Descartes' view of the mind according to which I cannot fail to know with certainty that I am thinking and what it is that I am thinking while I am thinking about it. In the case of ideas, this interpretation says that we always have an immediate and infallible access to the object represented by an idea, and that this is the mark of the mental-to use Rorty's phrase 2-i.e., that this is one certain mark by means of which we can tell that a particular representation is a mental operation. Here I shall put forward some compelling reasons to reject this manner of understanding ideas-and thus the realm of the mental-in Descartes and shall defend an alternative interpretation according to which there is a distinction in Descartes between what an idea appears to represent and what it 5 See her Descartes, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 112. However, in a more recent work of hers, "Descartes on the Representationality of Sensation," (in Central Themes in Modern Philosophy. J. A. Cover and Mark Kulstad, eds.; Hackett, 1990; 1-22), she appears to think that Descartes' notion of material falsity, though not fully explained, is not necessarily disastrous. Also, Martha Bolton, in her "Confused and Obscure Ideas of Sense," in Essays on Descartes' Meditations, ed. by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986), 393, thinks that the notion of material falsity in Descartes is a disaster because it entails that "the cognitive content of an idea can diverge from the object of the idea." She herself, however, does accept that there could be a non-disastrous version of the distinction between what an idea appears to represent and what it actually represents (Ibid., 395)-although she does not explain precisely what this version is.
THE HIGHLIGHTS OF DESCARTES' EPISTEMOLOGY (AN INTRODUCTION
Roczniki Filozoficzne / Annales de Philosophie / Annals of Philosophy, 2020
JOURNAL ARTICLE THE HIGHLIGHTS OF DESCARTES’ EPISTEMOLOGY (AN INTRODUCTION) PRZEMYSŁAW GUT and ARKADIUSZ GUT Roczniki Filozoficzne / Annales de Philosophie / Annals of Philosophy Vol. 68, No. 2, Descartes’ Epistemology Special Issue (2020)
Ideas and Reality in Descartes
Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza, edited by Martina Reuter and Frans Svensson. London: Routledge, 2019
This chapter explores some key issues within Descartes’s theory of cognition. The starting-point is a recent interpretation, according to which Descartes is part of a tradition of theorizing about human cognition, beginning from the idea that we are in principle capable of articulating or grasping the basic order of reality. Earlier readings often take Descartes to question whether we have any cognitive access to reality at all. On the new reading, Descartes instead defends a robust conception of our cognitive relation to reality—our cognition needs to be “determined by reality,” as John Carriero puts it. One important element of Carriero’s interpretation is that Descartes’s notion of idea is to be understood along the lines of the Aristotelian doctrine of formal identity between cognizer and cognized. Here it is argued that retaining the latter doctrine faces some difficulties, given the novel conception of the structure of reality defended by Descartes. This chapter proposes that he needs an alternative account of what it is for a cognizer to be determined by reality. Attending to some important differences between the innate idea of extension and that of God, the chapter concludes that Descartes may not have a fully worked-out account of his own. Considering some of the problems inherent in his views can, however, shed light on the, from our contemporary perspective, peculiar role both Spinoza and Leibniz give to God in accounting for cognition.
The Unity of Descartes's Thought
History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2005
Dualism--that the world divides to the mental and the corporeal--is a central tenet in Descartes's philosophy. It is therefore puzzling that Descartes sometimes suggests that certain phenomena--including perceptions, sensations, emotions, called the 'special modes'--belong to neither mind nor body alone, but specifically to the union of the two. It has been suggested that, accordingly, we should regard Descartes as a 'trialist' rather than a dualist. I criticize the 'trialist' interpretation, and offer an explanation of the theory of the special modes which reveals it to be perfectly compatible with Descartes's dualism.