Reading Notes: July 13th, 2024

“The only thinker within the early Cartesian School who called in question the doctrine of representative perception was Arnauld. In his Traite des Vraies et Des Fausses Idees, which was written as a criticism of Malebranche’s Recherche de la Verite, he states in the most definite manner that there is no direct evidence of the existence of subjective states, acting as intermediaries between mind and matter, and that the sole (and on his view insufficient) ground for their assumption is (as we have already seen in the Chapter on Descartes’ problem) the local difference between object known and the brain through which it is known….Even the ground that objects cannot be known directly, since they are material and therefore wholly different from the immaterial mind, reduces to this one ground. For it is because the mind is unextended, that, even though it be locally present to a body, it still remains external to it. As Malebranche remarks, though the mind were to issue out of the body in order to visit the sun, being unextended, it could not contain that star within itself, and would therefore, even though it got inside it, still remain as external to it as one body is to another.” (Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, 115-116)

“Sense and imagination are, therefore, [in Descartes philosophy] related to thought in the same way that figure and motion are related to extension, that is, as modes to their common attribute.” (Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, 127)

“In [self-consciousness] we have experience of a unity that is capable of maintaining itself throughout the variety of its states, and of an activity that progressively unfolds that unity in the realisation of desire. Further, within the unity of each perception there is always involved a multiplicity, infinitely complex.” (Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, 167)

“Materialism has on its side a formidable array of arguments from facts. It can point to certain and undeniable and invariable sequences of cause and effect. All sorts of disturbances and alterations of consciousness arise when poisons are introduced into the blood, from the excitement or stupor of intoxication to the profound coma of Bright’s disease. Again, my brain processes slacken down, and I pass into the unconsciousness of dreamless sleep. They are interfered with by the rupture of a blood vessel, and, either special departments of my consciousness are interfered with, or I lose consciousness altogether, or for so long as the interference lasts, that is to say, according to the extent and persistence of the lesion. My brain processes cease altogether, and—the inference seems too obvious to state. And yet the extreme conclusion does not follow unless materialism can show that physical processes give rise to consciousness in the first place. If they cannot, there will be no need to infer that their ceasing must cause its extinction.” (Sinclair, A Defense of Idealism, 76-77)