In the latter half of the 17th century, Antoine Arnauld was a public and private defender of many of the central tenets of Cartesianism. Yet, one issue on which he is surprisingly silent is René Descartes’ claim that God freely created the eternal truths (the Creation Doctrine). Despite Arnauld’s evasion of the issue, whether he holds the Creation Doctrine is one of the most contested issues in Arnauld scholarship. In this paper I offer an interpretation of Arnauld’s position. I argue (...) that Arnauld does not hold what I call the metaphysical version of the Creation Doctrine according to which God in fact freely created the eternal truths. Rather, he holds what I call the epistemic version of the Creation Doctrine according to which we cannot know whether God freely created the eternal truths. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Indifference is a term often used to describe the sort of freedom had by the will according to the libertarian, or Molinist account. It is thought to be a univocal term. In fact, however, it is used in at least seven different ways, in a variety of domains during the early modern period. All of them have plausible roots in Descartes, but he himself uses the term in only one sense, and failure to notice this consistent use by him (...) has bedeviled interpretations of his account of the will. (shrink)

Descartes held the seemingly bizarre doctrine that the eternal truths are freely created by God. This 'Creation Doctrine' has been the subject of great misunderstandings and ridicule from philosophers and theologians from the seventeenth century to the present. ;This dissertation is a sympathetic interpretation of Descartes' Creation Doctrine. After first briefly examining some alternative views concerning the relationship between the eternal truths and God, I argue that Descartes is committed to the Creation Doctrine because of his acceptance of traditional theological (...) views concerning the nature of God, in particular, God's simplicity and freedom. I then argue that Descartes' Creation Doctrine, contrary to the claims of some recent commentators, does not entail any bizarre modal theses. For instance, the fact that God could have willed that the eternal truths are false does not entail that there are no necessary truths. I conclude by offering an interpretation of Descartes' explanation of the necessity of the eternal truths. ;We will see that the Creation Doctrine is theologically well-grounded, does not affect ordinary modal claims, and in fact, guarantees the necessity of the eternal truths. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a novel interpretation of Antoine Arnauld’s conception of God, namely a ‘partially hidden’ conception of God. I focus on divine simplicity and whether God acts for reasons. I argue that Arnauld holds the view that: God, God’s action and God’s attributes are (i) identical, and (ii) conceptually distinct, but that (iii) there are no conceptual priorities among them. Next, I argue that Arnauld’s view about whether God has any type of reasons is agnosticism, but that (...) there are certain types of reasons we know that God does not have, e.g., practical reasons. (shrink)