ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters I have followed quite closely Descartes’s development of his argument in the first two Meditations. However, my purpose is not to provide a continuous commentary on the whole argument of the Meditations, but rather to analyze closely certain parts of that argument, within the framework of a general conception of the nature and purpose of the work. In the present chapter, and in later ones, I will depart from systematic exegesis. I will consider in detail only certain prominent features of Descartes’s development of his argument in Meditations III, IV, V, and VI. I will be concerned, particularly, with further aspects of his theory of our knowledge of mind and body, and also, in the present chapter, with the notion of a deceiving creator and the doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. This will result in a rather foreshortened picture of the central part of the Meditations. For I will have very little to say about the arguments for the existence of God that occupy most of the Third and Fifth Meditations. While these arguments are interesting enough, I don’t think Descartes is in a position to defend their soundness very forcefully. (I give one or two reasons for this view in passing, though I don’t think it is a very problematic one.) In any case, I’m mainly interested in the place of the arguments in the over-all strategy of the Meditations, rather than in their logical details. I see them as, in part, vehicles for certain concepts and commitments whose importance is not limited to their roles in specific arguments: for instance, the distinction between finitude and dependence on the one hand, and infinitude and independence on the other, the theory of ‘true and immutable natures,’ and the perplexing concept of material falsity.
