Lecture Notes
1. He was a rather sickly child who developed an early interest in rising late.
2. His father was a prosperous lawyer who left him a considerable inheritance, which allowed him the leisure for philosophical and scientific pursuits.
3. He studied at the Jesuit college of LaFleche from age eleven to age nineteen.
4. He spent several years as a professional soldier, although he does not seem to have been involved in battles.
5. In 1619, he had a dream experience that heavily influenced his philosophical ambitions.
6. He did some traveling between 1620 and 1625 and settled in Holland in 1628 where he stayed nearly all the rest of his life.
a. Descartes strongly preferred a life of seclusion and changed his lodgings some 24 times during those 20 years in Holland.
7. Apparently he developed a dislike for reading. When a visitor asked to see his library, Descartes supposedly point to a half-dissected animal and said, "There are my books."
8. Upon hearing of Galileo’s fate at the hands of the Inquisition, he decided not to publish his book, The World.
a. Throughout his life, Descartes was interested in avoiding conflict with religious authorities.
9. In 1637, he anonymously published his Discourse on Method along with Dioptrics, Meteors, and Geometry.
a. Descartes is generally regarded as the founder of analytic geometry, the combining of algebra with geometrical figures.
b. Everybody has heard of "Cartesian coordinates."
10. In 1641, he published the Meditations, after having solicited and replied to objections regarding the work.
a. Descartes often claims that the objectors misunderstand his writings.
11. The Principles of Philosophy (which incorporated many claims from The World) was published in 1646.
12. Over the years, he developed considerable interest in experimentation.
13. In September, 1649, he made an ill-fated journey to Sweden--under the patronage of Queen Christina.
a. He took to instructing her about philosophy at 5:00 a.m.
b. He died of pneumonia on Feb. 11, 1650.
14. Descartes was the father of an illegitimate child, a daughter who died before the age of five (whose death he grieved); but he was not a man of amorous interests apparently. He did however have intellectual friendships with two notable women―Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the King of Bohemia and the young Queen Christina of Sweden.
1. Descartes made a refreshing attempt to rethink the basic problems of philosophy--beginning with a method of systematic doubt that was meant to assume nothing.
a. He was able to package this rethinking compactly in two short works that rendered them easily accessible to a wide audience.
b. His method of systematic doubt can be taken as the starting-point for modern epistemology.
1) Not everyone agreed with him though.
2) For some philosophers, Descartes’ approach to epistemology indicates a wrong turn.
2. His Four Rules of Method are a classic statement of philosophical procedure.
3. "Cogito ergo sum" may well be the most famous phrase in the history of philosophy.
4. A number of Descartes’ examples--the ball of wax, the possibility of God being a great deceiver, the separating of dreaming from waking states, and human automatons-- have become classic challenges for philosophical thought.
5. The mind-body problem, innate ideas, and the concept of clear and distinct ideas are fundamental problems of modern philosophy, most clearly traceable to Descartes.
6. His assertion that animals do not think has been a lightning rod for controversy.
7. He lays the groundwork for, and advocates, purely rational knowledge of the natural world--a fundamental theme of Continental philosophers through the time of Kant-- although it would be a mistake to ignore Descartes’ empiricism.
8. Although God’s existence is essential to Descartes’ philosophical system, he continues the separating of philosophy from religion.
1. Descartes wanted to apply the rigor and methods of mathematics to the subject of philosophy―with the intention of establishing philosophy on a sounder foundation.
a. He establishes four Rules of Method. The first Rule presents his standard of truth: the clear and distinct idea, beyond all possible doubt. (What constitutes a "clear and distinct idea" has always been a matter of controversy. In the Principles of Philosophy, he describes "clearness" as "what is present and apparent to an attentive mind" and describes "distinctness" as what "is so precise and different from all other objects" that everything about it is clear. It seems than distinctness applies to the clearness of every part of an idea--RY)
b. The second Rule consists in analysis, the breaking of complex wholes into parts.
c. The third Rule consists in synthesis, the orderly construction of wholes from the parts (much like the construction of geometry from definitions, axioms, and postulates).
d. His philosophical method must also be associated with the process of systematic doubt by which he relegates anything doubtful as being false until he can arrive at an idea or proposition about which doubt is impossible.
2. In keeping with the certainty of pure mathematics, he argues for the existence of purely rational (a priori), absolutely certain knowledge in the form of innate ideas implanted in the nature of the mind by God.
a. These innate ideas include his own existence, his essence as a thinking thing (a mind or soul), God's existence, other minds, the idea of material bodies as extended in space, other primary properties of material bodies, laws of nature. plus some other general knowledge of the physical world.
b. The knowledge of innate ideas does not extend however to all the details of existence, thereby providing the need for empirical approaches to knowing, based upon probabilities. (A fundamental difference between God and us is that God, a being with infinite understanding, can grasp everything instantaneously as an innate idea, whereas we have the limitations of our own finitude.)
c. Although Descartes makes a strong case for purely rational knowledge, he was deeply committed to arriving at useful knowledge through experiment to aid human beings.
3. With respect to the nature of reality, mind has priority for Descartes.
a. In so far as his essence consists in being a thinking thing, he does not need a body to exist.
b. He claims that we know the mind better than the body, as shown by his analysis of the ball of wax.
c. The powers of the mind--especially understanding and willing--are greater than the movement of bodies subject to mechanical causation.
d. We have only a moral assurance (namely, God's perfection by which God cannot be a deceiver) that bodies exist.
e. We should be clear though that bodies definitely exist, according to Descartes. He is not an idealist.
4. He regards the mind (soul) and the body as separate substances, thereby creating the problem of how the two interact.
a. His suggestion about the pineal gland as the seat of interaction is qualified and is not asserted as a clear and distinct idea.
b. The body is subject to mechanical processes and causation; but the mind possesses free will.
c. Free will is unbounded and infinite in scope (a claim he asserts as obvious and clear without need of careful analysis and justification) and, accordingly, is the faculty in us that is most in the image and likeness of God (it being infinite, whereas understanding is finite). Free will however is also the source of error--what happens when our will goes beyond our understanding in making judgments. That the will can err however does not in any way show any imperfection in God. It is our error. And we also should recognize that what appears as an imperfection to us can serve some greater perfection in the universe as a whole (a greater perfection that God, but not humans, can understand).
d. Animals do not have minds; they function simply according to the "disposition of their organs"--as shown by the fact that (a) they cannot use language as human beings with minds can and (b) they cannot do all the things that human beings with minds can (although Descartes grants that animals can do some things better than human beings).
d. The general nature of body (extension [in space]) can be understood in purely rational terms―primary properties being the key to grasping the nature of extension.
e. The soul (mind) is immortal.
5. Descartes raises various problems with respect to the senses.
a. They introduce distortions, for example, with respect to the size of the sun.
b. His analysis of the ball of wax shows how primary properties--such as extension in space, motion, and duration--take precedence over the secondary properties produced by the senses.
c. He tries to show how sensory impressions require some activity of the mind's understanding to make judgments about them (again, the point of his analysis of the ball of wax).
6. Although God is essential to Descartes’ system, God is presented more as a supremely intelligent designer rather than as a religious figure.
a. He offers three proof of God's existence (briefly alluded to here): The first asserting that a perfect being must exist to give us the idea of a perfect being because a cause must be powerful enough to produce its effect, the second showing existence is necessarily part of the idea of God's perfection in the same way that a triangle necessarily includes the idea of the sum of the angles equaling two right angles, and the need for God to conserve or preserve our existence over time.
b. According to Descartes, we understand the idea of God as a perfect being, although we do not understand the ideas associated with perfection in the same way that God does. Being finite, we cannot fully grasp God's infinity; thus God must be, in many important ways, incomprehensible to us.
7. In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes sketches the basis for an ethics based upon the way passions arise within us.
a. For Descartes, the basis for ethics should be rooted in the nature of the passions, thereby avoiding the shifting sands he associates with ancient works on morals.
b. The primitive passions are wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness.
c. All other passions are combinations or species of these six primitive ones.
d. Mastering the passions is the key to the enjoyment of this life.
e. All of the primitive passions are good in themselves, although we need to avoid their evil uses and excesses.
f. While passions ordinarily arise originally from within the body, there are some that pertain to the soul alone, such as the love of God.
g. Some of the worthwhile passions are generosity, esteem, self-satisfaction, and noblemindedness.
8. The development of a political philosophy is wholly foreign to Descartes’ temperament.
a. He pretty much avoids the subject, except that, in the Discourse on Method, he does make clear why he would not be a political revolutionary.
b. Although he is willing to make a radical reform of his own ideas personally, he does not advocate radical reform in society. He thinks that we probably are better off accepting society's imperfections rather than trying radical reform. And he gives the example, of getting to the top of a mountain by taking the winding, well-worn circular path rather than trying simply to climb straight up the mountain.
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