Cartesian Clarity
Philosophers' Imprint 20 (19):1-28 (2020)
Abstract
Clear and distinct perception is the centrepiece of Descartes’s philosophy — it is the source of all certainty — but what does he mean by ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’? According to the prevailing approach, what it means for a perception to be clear is that its content has a certain objective property, like truth. I argue instead that clarity is at least partly a subjective, phenomenal quality whereby a content is presented as true to the perceiving subject. Clarity comes in degrees. Any weak degree of clarity, available to the senses, can be merely subjective, since what it presents as true may not actually be true. But complete clarity, available to intellectual perception, has an objective dimension, since what it presents as true is always some truth, some bit of reality. Further, I argue that the other perceptual qualities that Descartes identifies — obscurity, confusion, and distinctness — are all defined in terms of clarity. Of particular note is the fact that distinctness is not a positive feature to be added to clarity: a distinct perception is just a completely clear perception.Author's Profile
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Citations of this work
Cartesian Intuition.Elliot Samuel Paul - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-31.
Metaphysics as Essentially Imaginative and Aiming at Understanding.Michaela Markham McSweeney - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (1):83-97.
Understanding Delusions: Evidence, Reason, and Experience.Chenwei Nie - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Warwick
References found in this work
After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions.Robert Pasnau - 2017 - Oxford University Press.
The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises.Gary Hatfield - 1986 - In Amelie Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes' Meditations. University of California Press. pp. 45–76.
Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes’s Meditations.John Carriero - 2008 - Princeton University Press.