Professor Adrian Moore: 'What Descartes Ought to Have Thought About Modality’

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My starting point is the first section of James Conant’s wonderful essay ‘The Search for Logically Alien Thought’, in which he discusses Descartes’s views about necessity and possibility. Conant is especially interested in claims that Descartes makes, with respect to propositions that on Descartes’s own conception are impossible, that we should nevertheless not say that not even God could make them true. I argue that these claims are lapses on Descartes’s part: he should not have made them. At the end of my essay I focus on one particularly important case where Descartes not only says what I think he should say, in contradistinction to these lapses, but makes crucial capital out of his entitlement to do so.