ABSTRACT
The Cartesian theodicy, and the radically voluntarist God behind it, have been the focus, severally and together, of much recent work on Descartes. This chapter approaches these topics by tracing how the account of deficiency as an absence of perfection in TMD develops in the Fourth Meditation, and how it comes to underpin Descartes’s account of the theodicy in that meditation, and in particular, his account of the limits of human knowledge in a universe created by a voluntarist God. An understanding of Descartes’s views on these matters will in turn be shown to cast light on Descartes’s treatment of the ‘errors of nature’ of the Sixth Meditation, as well as crucial aspects of the ethics that he subsequently develops.
