The thinking soul and the God’s omnipotence. Two motives in Descartes' justification of metaphysics

Q3 Arts and Humanities

Sententiae Pub Date : 2023-12-31 DOI:10.31649/sent01.01.203

Andrii Baumeister

引用次数: 0

Abstract

The author examines Descartes' doctrine as one of the first attempts to synthesize the new idea of Galilean science with the tradition of ancient and medieval metaphysics. This required a combination of a number of tendencies, two of which are the consideration of thinking as the main attribute of an incorporeal substance and the consideration of God's omnipotence as the ever-present context of human cognition. On the basis of Plato's Dialogues, the article proves that the first tendency (based on the thesis that it is impossible to derive eternal truths from sense experience) indicates Platonic motives in Descartes' thinking. The second tendency (represented by the thesis of the possibility of direct intuitive contemplation) appears as a derivative of the theses of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham about the determining role of unlimited grace in substantiating the human ability to intuitively cognize contingent facts. The author argues that these tendencies, despite belonging to different traditions, are united in Descartes by an inseparable synthesis, which is the living experience of the thinking soul in the face of God’s omnipotence.

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会思考的灵魂和上帝的万能。笛卡尔为形而上学辩护的两个动机

作者将笛卡尔的学说视为将伽利略科学新思想与古代和中世纪形而上学传统相结合的最初尝试之一。这需要将多种倾向结合起来，其中两种倾向是将思维视为无体物质的主要属性，以及将上帝的全能视为人类认知的永恒背景。文章以柏拉图的《对话录》为基础，证明了第一种倾向（基于不可能从感官经验中得出永恒真理的论点）表明了笛卡尔思维中的柏拉图动机。第二种倾向（以直接直观沉思的可能性这一论点为代表）是邓斯-司各脱（Duns Scotus）和威廉-奥卡姆（William of Ockham）关于无限恩典在证实人类直观认知偶然事实的能力方面的决定性作用的论点的衍生。作者认为，这些倾向尽管分属不同的传统，但在笛卡尔那里却由一个不可分割的综合体结合在一起，这就是面对上帝的全能，思考的灵魂所获得的活生生的体验。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Sententiae Arts and Humanities-Philosophy

CiteScore

0.40

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Sententiae is historico-philosophical open access journal. Journal created by Modern philosophy''s research group (Pascalian society). Founded in 2000. Published twice a year, in June and December. Our purpose is to foster the development of a wide gamut of contemporary approaches, active implementation of them into research practice, and establishment of high standards of teaching philosophy basing on the achievements of contemporary history of philosophy. Our key priority is to ensure the empirical substantiation of historico-philosophical conceptions, basing on the criteria of literality, exhaustivity, contextuality and taking into account the existing speculative interpretations. Jean-Luc Marion was the first to formulate this set of criteria in 1998 as the main features of contemporary researches of Descartes''s philosophy. We regard these principles as the methodological background of any substantiated research method in the history of philosophy. Publishing materials on all historico-philosophical topics, we pay special attention to researches in terminology, issues of philosophical translation and untranslatability, manuscript researches (including handwritten heritage of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy professors of ХVІІ–ХVІІІ century), and cover the development of large-scale projects in this area. We also publish new bilingual and commented Ukrainian translations of classical foreign philosophical texts. Among our priorities there is also a coverage of the history of philosophical thought in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries and its relations to the wider cultural context (theology, literature, natural sciences, political ideology etc). The content of each issue is distributed according to Genre Sections and Thematic Headings. Currently there are 10 Genre Sections.