Notes for 9/3/2026

  

9/3/2026

Are some things more real than others?

 

[Philosophy Club every Wednesday, 5-6 pm, in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences room 436 ("The Cave")

Bioethics club Tuesdays from 4:30-5:30 in CAS 436.]

 

Clear

Vivid

 

The “truth rule”

Whatever I perceive (conceive) vividly and clearly is true.

 

 

The Cartesian Circle:

(A)    In order to know that I can trust my intellectual judgments, I must know there is no deceitful God.

(B)    In order to know there is no deceitful God, I must know that I can trust my intellectual judgments.

 

 

Is there an escape from the circle?

 

Option 1: D doesn’t really mean A. (Truth rule is sufficient. M3 just uses argument for God as a “mopping up” example.)

 

Option 2: D doesn’t have to know he can trust his intellectual judgments to be able to trust them. (He only knows he can trust them at the end of M3.)(Faith/bootstrap solution.)

 

Option 3: No escape.

 

 

 

M3 argument for God’s existence:

1.          I have an idea of God.

2.          The idea of God contains the idea of a truly infinite and perfect being.

3.          The cause of any idea must contain at least as much actual or intrinsic reality (“formal”) as there is representative reality (“objective”) contained in the idea.

4.          The idea of God contains infinite representative reality.

5.          The cause of my idea of God must have infinite actual or intrinsic reality.

6.          There exists something with infinite actual or intrinsic reality.

7.          Only God himself could have infinite actual or intrinsic reality.

8.          God exists.

 

 

 

Actual or intrinsic reality: the amount of reality (or perfection) that a thing has insofar as it exists at all (i.e., the reality a thing has “in itself.”)

 

Representative reality: the degree of actual or intrinsic reality that an idea represents its object as having. (The idea of the amount of “realness” the thing would have if it exists.)

 

 

 

But does reality come in degrees?

 

 

Peter - Shadow play.

 

 

 

 

Hobbes objects that we have no idea of the infinite. Rather, we only have an idea of the indefinite.

 

 

 

 

 

Descartes replies that we DO have an idea of the infinite and it is different from the indefinite.

 

Where does the idea of the infinite come from?

Descartes concludes that it can only be innate because it must come from something infinite in itself.

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