Ayumu Tamura

Descartes’s theory of free will contains several controversial claims, one of which concerns the compatibility of human freedom of the will with divine providence. Descartes writes in the Principles of Philosophy: Our mind is finite, while the power of God is infinite—the power by which he not only knew from eternity whatever is or can be, but also willed it and preordained it. We may attain sufficient knowledge of this power to perceive clearly and distinctly that God possesses it; but we cannot get a sufficient grasp of it to see how it leaves the free actions of men undetermined. (P. Ph., AT-VIII, 20) What I want to focus on here is the basis for the claim that “[God] leaves the free actions of men undetermined”. Descartes himself does not give a detailed explanation of this and there are few previous studies that discuss this point thematically. This paper therefore aims to clarify the structure of Descartes’s argument, which led to the conclusion that “[God] leaves the free actions of men undetermined”. My interpretation is that Descartes employed inference to the best explanation, a method of selecting the best of several hypotheses, in his argument regarding the freedom of the will.

Descartes uses two ambiguous concepts—experientia (experience) and conscientia (consciousness/conscience)—on which he relies in the arguments that form the basis of his metaphysics, such as the cogito argument and the theory of the free will. It appears, however, that he used experientia and conscientia in a way that was unknown at the time, as shown by the French translations of the Meditations on First Philosophy and the Principles of Philosophy. But despite using these words in a sense that differed from their traditional definitions, Descartes never defined them, and interestingly, seems to have used them interchangeably. In this article, I discuss how Descartes used these words and explain why I think that prior to Cartesians like Malebranche and La Forge, Descartes had conceived the incipient idea of consciousness in the psychological sense that he conveyed by using experientia rather than conscientia. My conclusion is that, while Descartes uses conscientia in the traditional sense of (internal) testimony, which tells us about both the current and past mental states of the subject, he uses experientia in the sense of the actual performance of mental acts such as thinking and judging, which directly tells us only about the present mental state of the subject and is thus closer to our modern psychological concept of consciousness than conscientia.

Descartes uses the term experience (experientia; expérience) many time not only in the subject of physics but also in the one of metaphysics, especially in the arguments about the cogito and the free will: “he learns [‘I am thinking, therefore I am’] from experiencing in his own case that it is impossible that he should think without existing” (2ae Resp., AT-VII, 140; CSM-II, 100); “I cannot complain that the will or freedom of choice which I received from God is not sufficiently extensive or perfect, since I know by experience that it is not restricted in any way” (Med., AT-VII, 56; CSM-II, 39), and so on. However, it is not clear what Descartes means by the term experientia; he never defines it. Then what is experience in Descartes’ metaphysics? In this paper, I intend to explore what Descartes meant by the term “experience” in the context of metaphysics. To be concrete, I first compare Descartes with earlier philosophers and clarify that Descartes’ use of the term “experience” has characteristics that were not recognized earlier (Section 1). I then clarify what the role of experience in Descartes is, while examining the validity of previous studies that equate Descartes’ experience with intuition and understanding (sections 2 and 3).

This article is an attempt to answer the question whether Descartes had read Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. At first glance, the question seems trivial. This question, however, is of historico-philosophical significance in that it reveals, even if only partially, what Descartes, who is regarded as the father of early modern philosophy, inherited from his earlier intellectual legacy in formulating his own philosophy. I first compare statements from Sextus’s Outlines with corresponding statements from Descartes’s writings to identify their similarities in terms of content. This comparison focuses on their views regarding four subjects: the syllogistic, moral guidelines, the use of definitions, and true opinions. I then analyse and discuss whether the degree of similarity between these sets of statements is sufficient to conclude that the particular work of Descartes is based on Sextus’s arguments. This preliminary study can only provide indirect evidence that Descartes had read Sextus, for a thorough clarification of whether he read anything other than the works he himself stated that he had read (e.g., Cicero, Suárez), would require further circumstantial evidence, however weak it may be.

The aim of this paper is to bring an end to the interpretative dispute on Descartes’s cog­ito: is the cogito known by intuition or by inference? There have been several studies based on both analytical and historical approaches to the dispute, and it seems that we have exhausted all interpretations. Nevertheless, I wish to revisit this dispute, as it ap­pears that the previous studies have overlooked Descartes’s use of words and phrases, which is the most significant for understanding his various discourses on the cogito con­sistently. In this paper, I focus on the terms which Descartes uses to indicate the varied status of the cogito, such as ‘haec cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum’, ‘hanc propositionem, ego cogito, ergo sum’, ‘hanc conclusionem: cogito, ergo sum’, and so on; Descartes changes carefully the terms in each of the cogito arguments. By focusing on these terms, I try to interpret Descartes’s explanations consistently.

Descartes insists, “[...] there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me [...]” (AT-VII, 25; CSM-II, 17). In what way can we draw evidence that our existence can be drawn from our being deceived? The interpretations that the earlier studies have shown is not a monolith. Then I will search for some inherent characteristics of deception, and analyse the construction of the reasoning, “if a deceiver deceives me, I exist.” To be concrete, I show: 1) that it is not “I exist” but “I think” that is concluded from the supposition “a deceiver deceives me/I am deceived by a deceiver”; 2) that the attributions of the self as a thinking thing, i.e. understanding, affirming, and denying (AT-VII, 28; CSM-II, 19), are discovered in the very supposition of a deceiver.