The standard interpretation of Descartes's ethics maintains that virtue presupposes knowledge of metaphysics and the sciences. Lisa Shapiro, however, has argued that the meditator acquires the virtue of generosity in the Fourth Meditation, and that generosity contributes to her metaphysical achievements. Descartes's ethics and metaphsyics, then, must be intertwined. This view has been gaining traction in the recent literature. Omri Boehm, for example, has argued that generosity is foundational to the cogito. In this paper, I offer a close reading of (...) Cartesian generosity, arguing that the meditator cannot acquire generosity in the Second or Fourth Meditation. (shrink)

Commentators commonly assume that Descartes regards it as a function of the passions to inform us or teach us which things are beneficial and which are harmful. As a result, they tend to infer that Descartes regards the passions as an appropriate guide to what is beneficial or harmful. In this paper I argue that this conception of the role of the passions in Descartes is mistaken. First, in spite of a number of texts appearing to show the contrary, I (...) argue that Descartes does not regard it as the role of the passions to inform us about what is beneficial or harmful. Second, although Descartes calls the passions good and useful, I argue that Descartes does not think we should allow ourselves to be guided by them. When we recognize that the function of the passions is largely motivational and not informative, we can more easily understand Descartes's practical advice in The Passions of the Soul that happiness requires us to guide our passions instead of letting our passions guide us. (shrink)

Descartes claims that we can love God sensuously. However, it is prima facie unclear how this is possible, given that he is also committed to the impossibility of sensing or imagining God. In this essay, I show that Descartes has the metaphysical and psychophysical resources necessary to alleviate this tension. First, I discuss Descartes’s account of the intellectual love of God, demonstrating that the intellectual love of God constitutively involves the love of God’s creation. Second, I argue that an image (...) of God’s creation is sufficient for communicating the intellectual love of God to the body, so as to produce a sensuous love of God. And third, I discuss Descartes’s reasons for developing an account of the sensuous love of God. (shrink)

Descartes is not widely recognized for his ethics; indeed, most readers are unaware that he had an ethics. However, Descartes placed great importance on his ethics, claiming that ethics is the highest branch of his philosophical system. I aim to understand the systematic relationship Descartes envisions between his ethics and the rest of his philosophy, particularly his metaphysics and epistemology. I defend three main theses. First, I argue against the recent trend in the literature that claims that the chief virtue (...) in Descartes’ ethics—generosity—is acquired in the Meditations. On this view, the presence of moral virtue in the Meditations shows that ethical practice is intertwined with metaphysics and epistemology. I argue that generosity cannot be acquired in the Meditations because acquiring generosity presupposes several metaphysical and physical truths that the meditator cannot access given her epistemic position. Thus, I maintain that metaphysics and epistemology is foundational to ethics. Second, I resolve the tension between Descartes’ description of distinct virtues, and his insistence that there is only a single virtue—the disposition to judge well. Drawing from his theory of conceptual distinction in his metaphysics, I argue that Descartes offers a unique account of the unity of the virtues. Although Descartes describes different virtues, he thinks that all of them are identical to each other because they are reducible to the disposition to judge well. Nonetheless, we can conceptually distinguish between the virtues because we can regard the disposition to judge well in different ways given the various applications it has in different types of moral situations. Third, I show that some of Descartes’ ethical concepts inform his epistemology. I draw from Descartes’ theory of virtue to address “the problem of knowledge preservation,” that is, how to render perfect knowledge— scientia—stable in light of the instability of clear and distinct perceptions. I argue that Descartes intends to preserve scientia by grounding items of scientia in virtuous habits of belief. These habits of belief are established through repeated engagement with cognitive routes to clear and distinct perceptions, and are ultimately grounded in memory. This reading has the advantage of explaining Descartes’ notoriously confusing remarks about memory in response to the Cartesian circle. (shrink)