IDEAS, THINGS AND IDEAS OF THINGS IN DESCARTES’S METAPHYSICS (original) (raw)

According to a common and shared historiographic assumption, Descartes provides multiple non-equivalent definitions of the term ‘idea’ and he uses it rather indiscriminately and even inconsistently at times. In the first part of this paper, I will show that Descartes’s theory of ideas, as it is formulated in all his texts of the 1640s, is a coherent, powerful and extremely elegant theory, which is well rooted in his broader theory of mind. The analysis of the analogical use of the term ‘idea’ and of its analogatum princeps introduces the second part of this paper, devoted to the Cartesian notion of res, ‘thing’: I will show that this notion, rather than being a simple synonym of substantia, to which the majority of scholars currently restrict the term, plays a pivotal role in Descartes’s philosophia prima. In the third part of this paper, I will verify the results obtained regarding the vexata quæstio raised by Descartes’s use of the notions of realitas objectiva and falsitas materialis in the famous passage of III Meditatio. Reread in a radically new light, this passage appears as a fully coherent, though veiled, expression of the philosopher’s intellectual beliefs and scientific commitments. In the fourth and last part of the paper, I will analyse the condition that a thing has to satisfy in order to be a substance and I will give my answer to the question ‘Is the concept of substance really redundant in Descartes’s metaphysics?’

Sign up for access to the world's latest research.

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact