ABSTRACT
In his recent paper, ‘Mirrors and veils, thoughts and things’, Yolton says that ‘the writers on perception from Descartes to Reid [. . .] were attempting to articulate a form of direct realism’, and that ‘the dominant view about ideas was not that ideas were proxy, inner objects preventing direct access to the physical world’.1 This interpretation of modern theories of ideas is opposed not only to the ‘traditional’ interpretation of Descartes and Locke – according to which they put a kind of inner object, tertium quid, between our minds and objects – but also to a view such as Rorty’s which criticises the modern ‘epistemological problematic’ on the basis of the ‘traditional’ interpretation. To make Yolton’s basic direction of interpretation clear, I will summarise his central arguments in the paper, in which he asks whether it is valid to regard Descartes’ and Locke’s ideas as a veil.
