David Cunning

Systematic Divergences in Malebranche and Cudworth

For Cudworth, God would be a drudge if He did each and every thing, and so the universe contains plastic natures. Malebranche argues that finite power is unintelligible and thus that God does do each and every thing. The supremacy of God is reflected in the range of His activity and also in the manner of His activity: He acts by general non-composite volitions. Malebranche (like Cudworth) is careful to adjust other aspects of his system to square with his position on causality, but his view that we are free and accountable for what we do will not be revised.

True and immutable natures and epistemic progress in Descartes's Meditations

In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes introduces a being for which his system appears to leave no room. He clearly and distinctly perceives geometrical properties and concludes that, even though they may not actually exist, their true and immutable natures exist nonetheless. Existing accounts of these natures tell us that they are something other than the objects that have them. Here I argue that these accounts (1) violate central tenets of Descartes’s metaphysics and epistemology and (2) fail to appreciate that the wedge that Descartes drives between an object and its true and immutable nature is only temporary. At the end of the day, the true and immutable nature of any X is just X itself. Descartes’s meditator is not able to notice this in the Fifth Meditation, but this is only because his epistemic position has not yet been sufficiently enhanced. The structure of the paper is as follows. First, I offer a survey of problems with existing views on true and immutable natures. Second, I defend my alternative reading. I conclude by showing how Descartes’s discussion of true and immutable natures is a manifestation of the more general method of the Meditations .

Fifth meditation TINs revisited: A reply to criticisms of the epistemic interpretation

In a recent article in this journal, I offer an interpretation of Cartesian true and immutable natures (TINs) according to which they are identical with the objects that have them. I argue that any Fifth Meditation suggestions to the contrary reflect that Descartes’s Fifth Meditation meditator is still making epistemic progress in the Meditations and is not yet a full-blown Cartesian. Here I defend the interpretation against recent criticisms. In the process I attempt to shed further light on Descartes’s larger epistemological project. First a brief review of the interpretation is in order. In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes considers his clear and distinct ideas of geometrical properties and says that even though the properties themselves perhaps do not exist, he can at least infer the existence of their true and immutable natures (AT 7, 64). Commentators have attempted to make sense of the ontological status of these natures: as third-realm entities, or entities in the mind of God, or innate ideas considered with respect to their

Agency And Consciousness

In Intentionality and other works, John Searle establishes himself as a leading defender of the view that consciousness of what one is doing is always a component of one’s action. In this paper I focus on problems with Searle’s view to establish that there are actions in which the agent is not at all aware of what she is doing. I argue that any theory that misses this sort of action keeps us from important insights into autonomy, self-knowledge and responsibility.

The Third Meditation

I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I will regard all such images as vacuous, false and worthless. I will converse with myself and scrutinize myself more deeply; and in this way I will attempt to achieve, little by little, a more intimate knowledge of myself. I am a thing that thinks: that is, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions; for as I have noted before, even though the objects of my sensory experience and imagination may have no existence outside me, nonetheless the modes of thinking which I refer to as cases of sensory perception and imagination, in so far as they are simply modes of thinking, do exist within me—of that I am certain. In this brief list I have gone through everything I truly know, or at least everything I have so far discovered that I know. Now I will cast around more carefully to see whether there may be other things within me which I have not yet noticed. I am certain that I am a thinking thing. Do I not therefore also know what is required for my being certain about anything? In this first item of knowledge there is simply a clear and distinct perception of what I am asserting; this would not be enough to make me certain .f the truth of the matter if it could ever turn out .hat something which I perceived with such clarity and distinctness was false. So I now seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true. Yet I previously accepted as wholly certain and evident many things which I afterwards realized were doubtful. What were these? The earth, sky, stars, and everything else that I apprehended with the senses. But what was it about them that I perceived clearly? Just that the ideas, or thoughts, of such things appeared before my mind. Yet even now I am not denying that these ideas occur within me. But there was something else which I used to assert, and which through habitual belief I thought I perceived clearly, although I did not in fact do so. This was that there were things outside me which were the sources of my ideas and which resembled them in all respects. Here was my mistake; or at any rate, if my judgement was true, it was not thanks to the strength of my perception.

Descartes on God and the Products of His Will

Descartes begins the Meditations with a number of remarkable claims about what is possible – it is possible that God is a deceiver; it is possible that God does not exist and that we arrived at our present state by chance; it is possible that an evil demon is constantly manipulating our minds to regard what is false as utterly evident and true. Descartes’ epistemological project is of course in serious trouble if he establishes in the First Meditation that it is possible that we are mistaken about what is most evident to us. Here I argue that Descartes holds that a non-deceiving God exists necessarily; the possibility claims of the First Meditation are the deliverances of the mind of Descartes’ amateur and not yet sufficiently reflective meditator and not Descartes himself. Other possibility claims in Descartes’ corpus are to be understood in terms of Descartes’ Spinozistic view of divine freedom.