Abstract

Boldly describing the mind as the idea of the body – and the body as the most immediate object of our thinking – opens the way to a solution of the mind-body problem that Descartes bequeathed to philosophers discontented with substantial forms: Thought and extension, being of different natures, cannot explain one another. But if the mind intends the body, the congruence of mental and physical events makes sense. The order and connection of ideas parallels the order and connection of their objects. So thoughts can address the world; ideas, in fact, can initiate actions. The lively subjectivity and reflectiveness of ideas helps further, in overcoming skepticism, dissolving the barrier between our thinking and its intellectual objects. The causal interconnectedness of natural objects can thus motivate a level of coherence and system among ideas that speaks up for the correspondence of adequate ideas to what they represent.