Difference between revisions of "Quotations on DTOI"

Quotations on DTOI

Lex Newman: "Descartes's transformation of the notion of ideas deeply influenced subsequent thinking about their nature and epistemic significance in philosophical inquiry." (Ch. 7 "Theories of Ideas" in The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy, edited by Dan Kaufman, 195–223. New York: Routledge, 2018.)

Georges Dicker: "Like Aquinas’s arguments, Descartes’s Meditation III proofs reason from certain effects to God as the cause of those effects. However, unlike Aquinas’s arguments, Descartes’s proofs cannot appeal to any of God’s effects in the physical world; for remember that at this point in the Meditations, the existence of the entire physical world is still in doubt. Accordingly, Descartes’s strategy is to argue from the idea of God that he finds in his mind to God as the cause of that idea. His first proof starts just from the idea of God and attempts to show that God himself is the only possible cause of that idea. His second proof builds on the first by trying to show that only God could cause the existence of a thinking thing that has the idea of God. The second proof depends upon the first, so we shall concentrate our attention on the first. . . . Since Descartes’s argument starts from the idea of God, he prepares the way for the argument by discussing the nature of ideas." (Georges Dicker, Descartes: An Analytical and Historical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 122)