Welcome to an academic blog dedicated to exploring René Descartes’s theory of ideas, authored by Dr. David C. Ring, an emeritus professor of philosophy who retired in 2015 from Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, CA. Dr. Ring holds a B.A. in philosophy from Cornell University (1974) and an M.A. (1980) and Ph.D. (1987) in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation, titled “Material Falsity, Objective Reality, and Representation in Descartes’s Theory of Ideas,” was supervised by Dr. Terry Penner.

Dr. Ring’s fascination with Descartes began during his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Cornell University, where he attended a Descartes course taught by esteemed Wittgenstein scholar Norman Malcolm (1911–1990). His teaching career commenced as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison while working on his Ph.D. Dr. Ring went on to teach a range of philosophy courses in introduction to philosophy, ethics, critical thinking, symbolic logic, history of early modern philosophy (Descartes through Kant), and epistemology at various institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Arlington, North Carolina State University, California State University Long Beach, Pasadena City College, Long Beach City College, and Cerritos College. He spent the last sixteen years of his career at Orange Coast College, ultimately becoming a full professor and chair of the Philosophy department.

Dr. Ring is currently an affiliate at Northern Arizona University. In Fall 2025, he is assisting via ZOOM in Professor George Rudebusch’s senior capstone seminar on Plato’s dialogue “Theaetetus” incorporating AI.