The Creation of Necessity: Making Sense of Cartesian Modality

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Grand Valley University, USA

Abstract

In Descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: T1) God freely creates the eternal truths (i.e. the Creation Doctrine) and T2) The eternal truths are necessarily true. According to T1 God freely chooses which propositions to make necessary, contingent and possible. However the Creation Doctrine makes the acceptance of T2 tenuous for the Creation Doctrine implies that God could have acted otherwise--instantiating an entirely different set of necessary truths. Jonathan Bennett seeks to reconcile T1 and T2 by relativizing modality to human understanding. I argue that Bennett’s approach to Cartesian modality is misplaced: One does not have to resort to conceptualism about modality in order to explain the subjective language found in Descartes or to reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine with the necessity of the eternal truths. After showing that Bennett’s argument implies that Descartes held the non-eternality of the eternal truths and the independence of the eternal truths from God, I show that if one understands Descartes’ use modal terms as indexed to God’s willing, then apparent contradictions vanish. In addition, I show that if one evaluates the truth value of modal propositions ‘non-bivalently’, then one can also unravel the apparent contradiction. One can reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine (T1) and the necessity of the eternal truths (T2) without Bennett’s conceptualism.

Keywords

References

Bennett, Jonathan. (1994). “Descartes’ Theory of Modality.” The Philosophical Review 103, No. 4: 639-667.
Curley, E. M. (1984). “Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths.” The Philosophical Review 93, No. 4: 569-597.
Frankfurt, Harry. (1977). “Descartes on the Creation of Eternal Truths.” The
     Philosophical Review 86, No. 1: 36-57.
Geach, P. T. (1973). “Omnipotence.” Philosophy 48: 7-20.
Kauffman, Dan. (2002). “Descartes’s Creation Doctrine and Modality.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80, No. 1: 24-41.
--------------------. (2005). “God’s Immutability and the Necessity of Descartes’s Eternal Truths.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43, No. 1: 1-19.
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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 9, Issue 17 - Serial Number 17
Articles
December 2015
Pages 153-171

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