Quotations on DTOI

Vere Chappell: "The distinction drawn in this passage, between the "material" and the "objective" senses of "idea," is the key to understanding Descartes' whole theory of ideas, which itself is the central component of his theory of knowledge. It is true that this distinction is not made explicitly anywhere else in the Cartesian corpus (though there are several passages in which a related distinction is drawn). But it is implicit at many points, in the Meditations and in later Works,—as well as in the Discourse. That is, Descartes uses the word with these different meanings, and it is often crucial to the cogency or even the intelligibility of a particular passage that the right one of the two be understood." (Verne Chappell, "The Theory of Ideas," in Essays on Descartes' Meditations, edited by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Berkeley: University of California, 1980, 177–8; bold not in original)

Lex Newman: "Descartes's transformation of the notion of ideas deeply influenced subsequent thinking about their nature and epistemic significance in philosophical inquiry." (Abstract, first sentence, 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, 2nd ed., 101. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; bold not in original)

Georges Dicker: "Descartes scholars have proposed diﬀerent interpretations of his diﬃcult notion of material falsity, which will not be discussed in further detail in this book, since it does not play any role in his central arguments." (Georges Dicker, Descartes: An Analytical and Historical Introduction, 2nd ed., 103. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; bold and bold italic not in original)