Descartes on the Innateness of All Ideas
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 355 Volume 32, Number 3, September 2002, pp. 355-388 Descartes on the Innateness of All Ideas GEOFFREY GORHAM Macalester College St. Paul, MN 55105-1899 USA I Introduction Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately na tivist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind (AT 8B 358, AT 3 418; CSM 1 304, CSMK 187).1 One reason it is surprising to find Descartes endorsing universal innateness is that such a view seems to leave no role for bodies in the production of our ideas of them. For how could bodies be the origin of our sensory ideas if, as Descartes says in a 1641 letter to Mersenne, these ideas 'must have been in us before' the stimulation of the sense organs (AT 3 418; CSMKI87)? This question has lately received considerable attention in the secondary literature, with the large majority of commentators arguing that, given a sufficiently nuanced account of what it means for sensory ideas to be innate, the universal innateness thesis does not preclude a significant causal role for 'AT' refers to Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 Volumes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds. (Paris: J. Vrin 1996); 'CSM' refers to Rene Descartes, The Philo sophical Writings of Descartes, 2 Volumes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985); 'CSMK' refers to Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: The Correspondence, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, eds.
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