Types of IDEAS and SUBSTANCES for DISCARDES

In this lesson from a TEACHER we explain the different types of ideas and substances for Descartes, two fundamental aspects of the thought of the French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, and the father of the modern philosophy, as well as one of the most influential figures in the scientific revolution of the 16th and XVII. Descarte has influences from late Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Saint Augustine. He defends a mechanistic view of the universe and a substantial dualism between soul and body, unlike Aristotle.

Laid the foundations of rationalism of Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz, faced with the English empiricists like Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. In addition, he has greatly influenced the development of science and mathematics and is considered the father of analytical geometry. If you want to know more about the types of ideas and substances for Descartes, keep reading this article by a PROFESSOR.

Index

1. Ideas for Descartes
2. Different types of Ideas for Descartes
3. Types of substances for Descartes

Before talking about the different types of ideas for Descartes, we explain what ideas are for the French thinker. Well, when Descartes talks about ideas, he is referring to any content of the mind capable of representing something. He does not go into details, and he makes it clear that ideas are both sensations and emotions, as well as objects of memory, imagination or thought.

But ultimately, the ideas are the mental contents that they can represent things like sensations, imagination, thought and he classifies them into adventitious, factitious and innate ideas.

Descartes breaks with the traditional use of the word "idea", based on Plato's theory, it was even accepted among empiricists, and today it is still used in the same way. Thus, Descartes defends the existence of three types of Ideas, namely:

1. Adventitious Ideas: Are those that are born from the sensitive experience
2. Factual Ideas: Are the ideas that arise from the combination of more than one idea
3. Innate Ideas: So the most important, and are those Ideas that are known to be true by the fact of existing, not by experience or combination. This Idea is directly related to the idea of ​​God, that of eternity, that of infinity, that of perfection, all of them attributes of the first.

The innate ideas are the most important of all and are the ideas that are in our mind prior to any experience, such as the Ideas of God, of eternity, of perfection, of infinity. God is all these things, therefore these ideas must have been implanted in our minds by God. The ideas of substance or mathematics are also innate ideas, and in addition, there are innate principles or eternal truths, such as those of logic or physics.

“I use this term in the same sense as when we affirm that generosity is innate in some families and that in others some diseases such as gout or calculus are, but not in the sense that the children of these families suffer from these diseases from the womb of their mothers, but rather in the sense that they are born with a certain disposition or faculty to acquire them ”.

Clear and distinct ideas of simple natures are innate, as is knowledge of certain and universal principles and the laws of physics. Science becomes deductive, and the experiment begins to lose importance. From here, two great philosophical currents are born: the empiricistand the rationalist.

The substance is for Descartes what it does not need anything else to exist, therefore, only God would be a substance, since other beings need God to exist. But you can also derive and understand the concept of substance as those natural beings that only need God to exist, to differentiate them from their qualities or attributes.

Thus, Descartes is going to distinguish three types of substances:

1. Res Cogitans: The mind, the thought.
2. Extensive Res: The material world, the body.
3. Res Divina: God, the eternal and infinite substance on which all others depend.

The rest of the properties are nothing more than modifications of the substance: figure, movement, in the case of the res vast or imagination, feeling or will, in the case of the res cogitans.

“By God I understand an eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent infinite substance, which has created myself and all other things that exist, if any exist. Well, what I understand as God is so great and eminent that the more carefully I consider it the less convinced I am that such an idea can come only from me. And, consequently, one must necessarily conclude, according to the foregoing, that God exists. For even if I have the idea of ​​substance by virtue of my being a substance, I could not have the idea of ​​a infinite substance, being me finite, if I had not put in me a substance that was truly infinite. "

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