Descartes's conceptual distinction and its ontological import

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 121-144

  Skirry, Justin ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950279121     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2004.0036     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. The standard English edition (CSM or CSMK) is: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, trans. and eds. 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-91). Citations of Descartes's works will appear in the text.
2. Jean LaPorte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 190-91.
3. Marleen Rozemond, Descartes's Dualism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 11 and 221 n.19.
4. Jorge Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics: The Late Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) ,198, 214, and 230.
5. Lawrence Nolan offers a nominalist interpretation of attributes in his paper "Reductionism and Nominalism in Descartes's Theory of Attributes," Topoi 16 (1997): 129-40.
6. His position is criticized later in this paper. Finally, Jean-Luc Marion considers the identification of principal attribute and substance to be a requirement for making the inference from "I think" to "I am" and "I am a thinking substance." See Jean-Luc Marion, Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 161. My account of the conceptual distinction permits this inference as well.
7. Dugald Murdoch, "Exclusion and Abstraction in Descartes's Metaphysics," The Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1993): 38-57 and 38-42. I sketch his position in the paragraphs that follow.
8. Nolan provides a similar summary of Murdoch's insight into the distinction between exclusion and abstraction (Lawrence Nolan, "Descarte's Theory of Universals." Philosophical Studies 89 [1998]: 161-180). He concludes that, although the notion of exclusion marks an ontological distinction among the distinguenda of the real and modal distinctions, the conceptual distinction is an exception. Nolan does not accept the claim that attributes are mutually dependent beings as implied by the criterion of exclusion because of his adherence to the standard account. However, it seems to me that the notion of exclusion would imply that attributes are mutually dependent beings, because the ability to exclude some but not all that pertains to the understanding of y from the understanding of x implies that x is ontologically dependent on y according to the modal distinction, and there is no reason to believe that ontological dependence does not also result for the conceptual distinction for the same reason.
9. Norman J. Wells, "Descartes on Distinction," Boston College Studies in Philosophy 1 (1966): 104-34.
10. Allan B. Wolter, The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus, Marilyn McCord Adams, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 28.
11. For more on Suarez on this issue, see Norman Wells, "Suarez, Historian and Critic of the Modal Distinction Between Essential Being and Existential Being," The New Scholasticism 36 (October, 1962): 425-27.
12. See Wells, "Suarez, Historian and Critic," 425-27 for a discussion of the identification of the formal and modal distinctions in Suarez.
13. The translation is found at: Francisco Suarez, On the Essence of Finite Being as Such, on the Existence of that Essence and Their Distinction, Norman Wells, trans. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1983), 50.
14. Also, see Maurice Grajewski, The Formal Distinction of Duns Scotus: A Study in Metaphysics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1944), 180-91.
15. For more on Descartes's conception of complete and incomplete being see Paul Hoffman, "Cartesian Composites," Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (1999): 251-70;
16. and Tad Schmaltz, "Descartes and Malebranche on Mind and Mind-Body Union," The Philosophical Review (April 1992): 281-325.