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2 results

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

  • from Part III - Sensations
  • Edited by Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Descartes' Meditations
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2012, pp 103-126

  • Summary

    The arguments and methods of reasoning seem much alike. This chapter discusses something new in Descartes' skepticism but it is not that its approach is methodological. It is rather that unlike ancient skepticism, Descartes' skepticism extends to the very content of ideas themselves. The chapter presents Descartes' three main skeptical arguments: the argument from illusion, the dreaming argument, and the Demon hypothesis, and each has ancient precedents. Arguments from conflicting impressions generated by different senses or circumstances or depending on different states of the perceiver were common among the Pyrrhonists and Academic skeptics. What Descartes' skeptic accepts does little to support Fine's claim that both ancient and modern skeptics accept appearances in the same way. Content skepticism arises in two places in the Meditations: in the transition between the dreaming and demon arguments, and in the discussion of material falsity.

  • Bibliography

  • Edited by Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Descartes' Meditations
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2012, pp 243-254

  • Summary

    This chapter considers Descartes' systematic doctrines on the nature of the mind and its ideas. It combines Descartes' statements on sensation and perception for hints about how to apply such principles. Outside the Meditations and Principles, Descartes discusses the anatomy, physiology, and mental operation of the senses in the Dioptrics and Passions. Descartes further develops the notion of ideas as images by explaining that differences in the objective reality of ideas amount to differences in what those ideas represent. The author favors an interpretation in which, for Descartes, all sensory ideas represent by resemblance, different kinds of sensory ideas vary in cognitive value, externalization arises through spatial localization, and, with sensory ideas of color and the like, as materially false they do not intrinsically misrepresent but afford occasion for false judgments, which arise as merely apparent, and so not actually legitimate, teachings of nature.