Chapter 6 - Sensation and knowledge of body in Descartes’Meditations

Summary

In the third Meditation, Descartes sketches a pre-critical conception of sensory cognition, that is, the conception of the senses that he takes the meditator to have entered the Meditations with. In the Sixth Meditation he presents his own theory of the senses. The thought that sensory ideas resemble things located outside of the author falls out of an Aristotelian picture of cognition. Descartes presents the belief in resemblance as a naïve commitment rather than a technical philosophical one, so it is worth doing what we can to make it recognizable and familiar. In his "Refutation of Idealism", Kant classifies Descartes as an idealist and explains idealism as the position "that the only immediate experience is inner experience, and that from it we can only infer outer things". Purposes of gauging Descartes' attitude toward the Aristotelian conception, it would appear that his remarks about resemblance take on special significance.