Abstract
8.1 Cartesian foundations: the role of doubt—The assumption of the ego cogito as minimal evidence—Why our faculties, including the sensitive one, can be reduced to mental faculties—Descartes’ goal: justifying the internal experience through an external order—God’s qualities: significance of existence—Difference between “formal reality” and “objective reality”. 8.2 Descartes on essentiality and existentiality—The scholastic tradition: in what way can there be in generated beings a “metaphysical distinction and composition between essence and existence”?—Beyond the mere impossibility of self-generation: actuality as non-essential—Two ways of looking at compositionality—Heidegger’s view of the problem. 8.3 Ontic and ontological statuses—The kind of existence we attribute—Physical and metaphysical worlds: why the seeming materiality of things is not enough to objectify them—Descartes on dreaming: its context-saturation—Modal uncertainty as unrestricted: analogy with astrophysical black holes—Imagination and necessitation—Flaws of Descartes’ conclusions—Sosa’s understanding of dreaming—Greco and Williams on Cartesian contextualism—The trouble with bringing formality and objectivity back together.
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Notes
- 1.
The title and subtitle that accompany the heading of the first meditation are not translated in Descartes 2008. They are: Meditationum de Prima Philosophia: In quibus Dei existentia, & animae a corpore distinctio demonstrantur. Apart from the nominative plural Meditationes and the adjective humana in front of anima, this is the same title and subtitle of the book, which Michael Moriarty translates as Meditations on First Philosophy: In which the existence of God and the distinction of the human soul from the body are demonstrated. The first meditation is headed “De iis quae in dubium revocari possunt”, which Moriarty renders as “Of those things that may be called into doubt” (2008: 17). This pagination refers to that of the Adam and Tannery edition, which appears in the margins of the Oxford translations.
- 2.
I have here amended Moriarty’s translation of “genius malignus” as “evil spirit” even though “evil genius” is also used in his translation.
- 3.
Descartes’ expression is “Ego sum, ego existo”, a cognate of the famous “ego cogito, ergo sum” employed in the Latin translation of the Discourse on the Method as Dissertatio de Methodo (1996a: 559). The original French “je pense, donc je suis” is translated by Ian Maclean as “I am thinking therefore I exist” (1996a/2006: 33).
- 4.
I do not think that Descartes’ words “Cogitare? Hic invenio: cogitatio est” are adequately rendered by Moriarty in terms of “What about thinking? Here I do find something: it is thought”. What Descartes is saying is that at least “thought is” or “exists”.
- 5.
Margaret Dauler Wilson’s suggestions for translating Descartes’ “istud nescio quid mei” as “that I know-not-what of me” or “that [unspecified] part [or aspect] of me” (2005: 69 and 203, n. 40) constitute valid options.
- 6.
Albert Hofstadter does not make a difference between the words Wesen and Wesenheit translating both as “essence” (Heidegger 1988: 88).
- 7.
See in addition Sosa 2017, Chap. 2 .
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Venturinha, N. (2018). Radical Scepticism. In: Description of Situations. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00154-4_8
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