چکیده:
In Descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: T1) God freely creates the eternal truths (i.e. the Creation Doctrine) and T2) The eternal truths are necessarily true. According to T1 God freely chooses which propositions to make necessary, contingent and possible. However the Creation Doctrine makes the acceptance of T2 tenuous for the Creation Doctrine implies that God could have acted otherwise--instantiating an entirely different set of necessary truths. Jonathan Bennett seeks to reconcile T1 and T2 by relativizing modality to human understanding. I argue that Bennett’s approach to Cartesian modality is misplaced: One does not have to resort to conceptualism about modality in order to explain the subjective language found in Descartes or to reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine with the necessity of the eternal truths. After showing that Bennett’s argument implies that Descartes held the non-eternality of the eternal truths and the independence of the eternal truths from God, I show that if one understands Descartes’ use modal terms as indexed to God’s willing, then apparent contradictions vanish. In addition, I show that if one evaluates the truth value of modal propositions ‘non-bivalently’, then one can also unravel the apparent contradiction. One can reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine (T1) and the necessity of the eternal truths (T2) without Bennett’s conceptualism.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The Creation of Necessity: Making Sense of Cartesian Modality* Beth Seacord ** Assistant Professor, Grand Valley University, USA Abstract In Descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: T1) God freely creates the eternal truths (i.
I argue that Bennett’s approach to Cartesian modality is misplaced: One does not have to resort to conceptualism about modality in order to explain the subjective language found in Descartes or to reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine with the necessity of the eternal truths.
After showing that Bennett’s argument implies that Descartes held the non-eternality of the eternal truths and the independence of the eternal truths from God, I show that if one understands Descartes’ use modal terms as indexed to God’s willing, then apparent contradictions vanish.
By making the truth value of modal propositions dependent on human perception, Bennett is able to make room for Descartes’ Creation Doctrine.
(CSMK 3:358) According to Bennett, the pairing the statements, “It is not impossible for God to make an uphill without a downhill” and “we cannot conceive of an uphill without a downhill” (Ibid, 645) should lead the reader to believe that the truth value of modal propositions is dependent on human perception.
It seems that Descartes would have rejected the possibility of God bringing about his own non-existence; but the difficulty is finding a principled and textually plausible way to insulate God’s person from Descartes’ own Creation Doctrine.
After arguing that one can reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine and the necessity of the eternal truths without Bennett’s conceptualism, I addressed the Bootstraps problem.