A Companion to Descartes || Clear and Distinct Perception

✍ Scribed by Broughton, Janet; Carriero, John

• Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Weight: 124 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 0470696435
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470696439.ch13

✦ Synopsis

Clear and Distinct Perception sarah patterson

Clear and distinct perception occupies a central place in Descartes's philosophy. His most famous work, the Meditations, is designed to teach his readers how to perceive clearly and distinctly. He wrote to Mersenne that "we have to form distinct ideas of the things we want to judge about, and this is what most people fail to do and what I have mainly tried to teach by my Meditations" (3:165; AT 3:272). We learn in the Fourth Meditation that everything we clearly and distinctly perceive is true: "if, whenever I have to make a judgment, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong" (2:43; AT 7:62). We are assured of this by our knowledge that we are created by a perfect God; since our clear and distinct perceptions are real things, they must come from God