Online research in philosophy

Nicolas Malebranche Famously holds that we see all things in the physical world by means of ideas in God. This is the doctrine of Vision in God. In his initial formulation of the doctrine in the first edition of the Search After Truth (1674), Malebranche seems to posit ideas of particular physical objects in God, such as the idea of the sun or the idea of a tree. However, in Elucidations of the Search published four years later he insists that (...) there is only one idea of extension and it is general.1 Malebranche refers to this idea as "intelligible extension," in part because he thinks that we confuse it with its object, material extension, which he takes to be unintelligible in itself. By insisting upon a .. (shrink)

The essays collected here cover a wide range of topics, including the foundation for the distinction, the question of whether or not it is metaphysical or ...

We argue that Descartes’s theistic proofs in the ’Meditations’ are much simpler and straightforward than they are traditionally taken to be. In particular, we show how the causal argument of the "Third Meditation" depends on the intuitively innocent principle that nothing comes from nothing, and not on the more controversial principle that the objective reality of an idea must have a cause with at least as much formal reality. We also demonstrate that the so-called ontological "argument" of the "Fifth Meditation" (...) is best understood not as a formal proof but as an axiom, revealed as self-evident by analytic meditation. (shrink)

In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes makes a remarkable claim about the ontological status of geometrical figures. He asserts that an object such as a triangle has a 'true and immutable nature' that does not depend on the mind, yet has being even if there are no triangles existing in the world. This statement has led many commentators to assume that Descartes is a Platonist regarding essences and in the philosophy of mathematics. One problem with this seemingly natural reading is that (...) it contradicts the conceptualist account of universals that one finds in the Principles of Philosophy and elsewhere. In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation of the notion of a true and immutable nature which reconciles the Fifth Meditation with the conceptualism of Descartes' other work. Specifically, I argue that Descartes takes natures to be innate ideas considered in terms of their so-called 'objective being'. (shrink)