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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Philosophy of religion
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The Will to Reason - Theodicy and Freedom in Descartes (Hardcover)
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The Will to Reason - Theodicy and Freedom in Descartes (Hardcover)
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Offering an original perspective on the central project of
Descartes' Meditations, this book argues that Descartes' free will
theodicy is crucial to his refutation of skepticism. A common
thread runs through Descartes' radical First Meditation doubts, his
Fourth Meditation discussion of error, and his pious reconciliation
of providence and freedom: each involves a clash of
perspectives-thinking of God seems to force conclusions
diametrically opposed to those we reach when thinking only of
ourselves. Descartes fears that a skeptic could exploit this clash
of perspectives to argue that Reason is not trustworthy because
self-contradictory. To refute the skeptic and vindicate the
consistency of Reason, it is not enough for Descartes to
demonstrate (in the Third Meditation) that our Creator is perfect;
he must also show (in the Fourth) that our errors cannot prove
God's imperfection. To do this, Descartes invokes the idea that we
err freely. However, prospects initially seem dim for this free
will theodicy, because Descartes appears to lack any consistent or
coherent understanding of human freedom. In an extremely in-depth
analysis spanning four chapters, Ragland argues that despite
initial appearances, Descartes consistently offered a coherent
understanding of human freedom: for Descartes, freedom is most
fundamentally the ability to do the right thing. Since we often do
wrong, actual humans must therefore be able to do otherwise-our
actions cannot be causally determined by God or our psychology. But
freedom is in principle compatible with determinism: while leaving
us free, God could have determined us to always do the good (or
believe the true). Though this conception of freedom is both
consistent and suitable to Descartes' purposes, when he attempts to
reconcile it with divine providence, Descartes's strategy fails,
running afoul of his infamous doctrine that God created the eternal
truths.
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