Descartes: A Biography

(nextflipdebug5) #1

c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :


 Descartes: A Biography

At about the same time, Voetius published the first of four volumes of the-
ological disputations, in which many of the disputed questions involved
in the earlier row with Descartes and Regius were reopened.Descartes
replied to the Regius/Wassenaer pamphlet with hisComments on a Certain
Manifesto, which seems to have been written toward the end of December
and was published in January.One of the principal objec-
tives oftheCommentswas to state publicly that Regius did not speak
forDescartes, and to dissociate their author from any collateral dam-
agethat might result from the apparent unorthodoxy of Regius’ views.
‘The other pamphlet...contained views which I think are pernicious and
false... [and] includes the name of someone, as author, who is believed
bymany people to teach views which are the same as mine. Therefore, I
am forced to expose its errors so that they will not be attributed to me’
(viii-.). They also included some references to an independent dis-
pute with theologians in Leiden (which is discussed in thenext chapter)
and a clarification of the relationship between faith and reason.
TheCommentsadd little to what had already been rejected by Descartes
onprevious occasions. They included a slightly clearer-than-usual expla-
nation of why he defended innate ideas and what he meant by the term,
so that he could claim with some justification that he disagreed with his
critic only verbally.

When he says that ‘the mind does not need innate ideas or notions or axioms’ while
conceding to it a faculty of thinking (apparently, natural or innate), he clearly affirms
the same reality as I do although he denies it verbally. I never wrote or claimed that
the mind needs innate ideas that are anything other than its faculty of thinking. How-
ever, when I noticed that I had certain thoughts, which did not come from external
objects or from the determination of my own will, but which resulted exclusively
from my faculty of thinking, I called them ‘innate’ in order to distinguish the ideas
or notions, which are the forms of those thoughts, from others that were acquired
or constructed. (viii-.–)

Descartes repeats the regret expressed in the Preface to thePrinciples(in
French), about having praised Regius in the past and having appeared to
endorse what he wrote as if it were a genuine reflection of his own position
(viii-.). He is now forced by his regrettable experience to admit that
Regius is motivated, not by a love of truth, but by a love of novelty.
Once it emerged into the public domain, this dispute followed the usual
pattern of replies to replies until one side or the other lost interest or died.
Regius responded to the CartesianCommentswith another booklet that
Free download pdf