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Descartes' Treatment of Innate Ideas

The purpose of this research is to examine Descartes's treatment of innate ideas, with particular reference to a passage in the Meditations in which he proposes a thought experiment with a lump of wax. The plan of the research will be to set forth the manner in which Descartes establishes the use of the wax as a point of reference for his argument, and then to discuss how he explains the idea of the wax that persists through the changes of its properties as an innate concept of the mind, in order to arrive at a conclusion about what is known in and about the wax.

What is important to understand about Descartes's elaboration of innate concepts of the mind is that it is systematic, programmatic, and methodical. That is, his approach is built on the premise of seeking a method for arriving at a position from which one can consider ideas clearly, distinctly, and certainly. This appears attributable to the fact that Descartes was a philosopher-mathematician, or man of science. But equally, one may infer the systematic approach from the structure of the Meditations, which begins with a synopsis of the six segments that are to follow. In the introductory section, Descartes develops the premises from which he will explain the multivaried qualities of the human mind, as the basis for his system of rational philosophy. Thus the First Meditation deals with the quality of doubt; the Second with mind itself, which is equated with the soul (4); the Third with the capacity of the mind to conceive perfection, which implies the capacity to conceive and acknowledge the existence of God; the Fourth with the quality of certainty or truth as apprehended by the mind; the Fifth with an understanding of certainty or truth as an aspect of the perfection (and hence) existence of God; the Sixth with the importance of distinguishing between intellect or understanding and imagination, with a view toward establishing the basis on which palpable reality can be ra...

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Descartes' Treatment of Innate Ideas. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:45, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1703202.html