Abstract

Descartes' epistemology bases all certainty on the existence of a God, who guarantees the truth of clear and distinct ideas. To prove the existence of God, Descartes gives several arguments, the most important of which, the so-called "causal" argument, appears in the Third Meditation . ;This dissertation shows that several important features of the causal argument were anticipated by Jesuit philosophy of cognition in the early seventeenth century: the claim that no cognition gives immediate awareness of its having been caused by its object, the notion that "objective being" has some relation to real existence, and the attempt to prove the real existence of an object of cognition via the use of eminent and formal containment arguments, are all present in Jesuit writings of the period. The most important Jesuits studied in the dissertation are Francisco Suarez, Antonio Ruvio and Roderigo de Arriaga. ;The dissertation concludes with the claim that Descartes' epistemology was motivated largely by the desire to demonstrate to the academic establishment of his day that the mechanical philosophy, despite its rejection of the traditional Aristotelian-style faith in the evidence of the senses, did not logically entail skepticism