“And since the ideas perceived by sense were much more vivid and lively, and even in their own way more distinct than any of those which I formed by knowing meditation … it did not seem possible that they proceeded from myself; and thus it had to be the case that they came from some other things. And since I had no other knowledge of such things except from these very ideas, nothing else could come to my mind than that the thingswere similar to the ideas.” (AT VII 75)
“Thought, in Descartes’s wide sense of the word, covers any conscious mental states, including emotions, feelings, and sense perceptions, and it is also used coextensively with idea and perception as general terms to cover both the acts and the objects of awareness.3 There is thus a sense of idea in which sensations, feelings, and passions, although in so far as they depend on the mind—body union they are said to be confused and obscure thoughts, can be called ideas.” (”Sensory Ideas, Materisl Falsity, and Objective Reality,” Lilli Alanen, 230)
“First, he used the word “to stand for whatever the mind directly perceives,”2 with the result that it extends over all possible contents of consciousness, including sense data, memories, images, acts of will, concepts, and apprehended propositions such as “Nothing comes from nothing.” (”Descartes’ Theory of Objective Reality,” E. J. Ashworth, The New Scholasticism 49, no. 3, (Summer 1975): 331-40)
2 E. Haldane and G. Ross, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge, 1968), II, 67–68.
Ideas in the strict sense are not mental images: See HR II, 52; 67-68; 129.
”By the objective reality of an idea, I understand the entity or the being of the thing represented by the idea insofar as this entity is in the idea …. For all that we· conceive as being in the objects of ideas, all this is objectively or by representation, in the ideas themselves.” (AT IX, 124. The Latin version, AT VII, 161, does not contain the phrase “or the being of the thing.” I find the translation of Haldane and Ross, HR II, 52-53, unclear. See also HR II, 2; 10; 157)
”True, our knowledge that such things exist ultimately depends on their having some effect on our sense organsand brain-and through the latter some effect on our minds. Also he takes it that variations in our sense experience correspond with some kind of differences in external things.” (”Descartes on Sense and Resemblance,” Margaret D. Wilson, In Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1999): 10–25.
That is, Descartes uses the word [’idea’] with these different meanings [formal versus objective] 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.
Not only are the two meanings of “idea” distinguished in the passage before us; they are also quite fully specified. Indeed, a good deal of the Cartesian theory of ideas is packed into the definitions provided. We can thus, on this basis alone, tell the following about Cartesian ideas. An idea in the material sense of the word is a mental act or event, something that occurs in the mind. An idea in the objective sense, by contrast, is something upon which the mind is directed, a mental object. (From now on I shall abbreviate idea in the material sense and idea in the objective sense to ideam and ideao respectively.)) Ideam and ideao, furthermore, are related, in that the latter are things represented by the former. The passage does not specify the nature of this relationship, beyond calling it representation; it does not even indicate whether the two terms related, ideam and ideao, are distinct entities or not. But it does suggest that the relation is necessary, at least on the side of the ideao: for it suggests that every ideao is represented by an ideam. Later on we shall see that the relation is necessary on the other side also, and that every ideam represents an ideao. Descartes’s position indeed is that there is, for every ideam, exactly one ideao that it represents, and for every ideao, exactly one ideam that represents it. (”The Theory of Ideas,” Vere Chappell, Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, edited by Amelie Rorty, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986, 178)
. . . . Finally, I take up a broader question about the relation between ideas in the two senses: to what extent are an ideam and its associated ideao distinct entities? Here again it is useful to know beforehand what the answer will be. It is that these are not distinct entities at all—not one individual thing and then a second, different one—but are rather one thing on the one hand, and an aspect or component of that same thing on the other. The ideam and the ideao only differ from one another, to use Descartes’s own expression, by a “distinction of reason.” (”The Theory of Ideas,” Vere Chappell, Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, edited by Amelie Rorty, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986, 178–79)
(”The Theory of Ideas,” Vere Chappell, Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, edited by Amelie Rorty, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986, 178–79)
362 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34 : 3 JULY 1996 privation.
Paul Hoffman “Descartes on Misrepresentation”
The idea of cold is presumably caused either by a particular motion or range of motions of bodies or by the absence of such motions. But according to his physics, the absence of motion is not a privation, it is not a non-thing. Instead, the absence of motion is rest, and rest is no less of a mode, no less of a thing, than motion.” Since he is clearly committed to denying that the cause of the idea of cold is a privation, there is nothing motivating him to deny that the idea of cold has objective reality. And he never does deny it. He considers the possibility that cold is a privation only as a way to introduce the concept of material falsity. Why does Descartes introduce the concept of material falsity in the Third Meditation if he does not believe that sensory ideas lack objective reality? I would argue that the notion of an idea’s having less objective reality than it appears to have is neither a red herring nor an embarrassment. Rather, Descartes is anticipating an objection to his argument for the existence of God:
“Nor can it be said that this idea of God is perhaps materially false and so could have come from nothing, which is what I observed just a moment ago in the case of the ideas of heat and cold, and so on. On the contrary, it is utterly clear and distinct, and contains in itself more objective reality than any other idea; hence there is no idea which is in itself truer or less liable to be suspected of falsehood. (AT VII 46; CSM II 31)
Wilson rejects this alternative explanation for Descartes’s introduction of the concept of material falsity:
“An alternative explanation, that has been suggested to me, is that Descartes was trying to anticipate what he perceived as a possible response to this theological proof: i.e. that a critic might spontaneously object that the idea of God could, like sensations, represent nothing real. However, it seems that the distinction between the clear and the distinct and the obscure should by itself be adequate basis for an answer to this objection: we don’t need the theory of material falsity.”
She seems to be asserting here that we do not need the concept of material falsity to answer the objection that the idea of God could represent nothing. But if we assume that Descartes holds, as surely he does, that the idea of God