Abstract

Scholars of seventeenth century philosophy increasingly recognize that Descartes is both the last medieval and the first modern thinker, and his work is revealed in recent literature as a sophisticated appropriation of as well as departure from his predecessors and contemporaries. Paradoxically, Descartes, the philosopher most associated with the repudiation of history and an insistence on radical originality, emerges as a transitional figure in the history of philosophy and one whose contributions cannot be understood in isolation from their intellectual context. Drawing on this literature, particularly the work of David Rapport Lachterman and Jean-Luc Marion, I offer a re-examination of Descartes' theory of knowing as a theory of the soul. Reconsidering Descartes' philosophy from the standpoint of the relationships among the intellect, imagination, and will, I argue that the central and well-known Cartesian epistemological questions regarding truth and certainty are in fact properly metaphysical in character. On this reading, Cartesian philosophy is characterized by distinctive internal tensions, which are variously given explicit articulation and occluded by Descartes himself. I study these tensions and the ensuing difficulties through analyses of the nature of method, the operations of the intellect, the discursive operations of representation and construction, and the significance of Descartes' theism