In the Name of God
"I say, then, in the second mansion is for those who have already begun to make use of prayer, and who understand how important it is for them not to remain in the first mansion."
St. Teresa 2nd Mansion
Best Explanation: The journey of the first mansion, the process of doubt, and how this process of doubt relates to Descartes
"Will cannot be called free, but only a necessary cause
Best Explanation: Spinoza's rules about cause and effect, how those rules limit free will
Ethics
Spinoza-title
Best Explanation: Why did he title it ethics?
"One substance cannot produce another substance"
Spinoza Prop 6
Best Explanation: Uses both cause and limits to explain why this is the case"
"Every substance is necessarily infinite"
Spinoza Prop 8
Best Explanation: Uses both cause and limits to explain why this is the case"
"God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists"
Spinoza Prop 11
Best Explanation: Naturalness argument for God
"On the other hand, arithmetic, geometry, and other such disciplines, which treat nothing but the simplest and most general things and which are indifferent as to whether these things do or do not exist"
Descartes Meditation I
Best Explanation: Different methods of doubt, Descartes' radical doubt, rationalism vs empiricism.
"Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true..."
Descartes Meditation I
Best explanation includes: Descartes method of radical doubt, dream, God, demons, painter analogy, and Descrates method out of radical out,
"For example, when I imagine a triangle, even if perhaps no such figure exists outside my thought anywhere in the world and never has, the triangle still has a certain determinate nature, essence, or form"
Descrates Meditation V
Best Explanation: Clear and distinct ideas and there relation to God
"Rather, the very nature of an idea is such that of itself it needs no formal reality other than what it borrows from my thought, of which it is a mode. But that a particular idea contains this as opposed to that objective reality is surely owing to some cause in which there is at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality"
Descrates Meditation III
Best Explaination: The difference between formal and objective reality, how they connect with each other (causal principle), and how they connect to the idea of God"
"Finally, I should not complain because God concurs with me in elicting those acts of will....since a privation is not a thing, nor, when it is related to God as its cause, is it to be called a privation, but simply a negation"
Descartes Meditation IV
Best Explanation: Why we error, why we shouldn't be mad at God that we error
"those require contact between the two things, and
the third requires that the causally active thing be extended. Your notion of the soul entirely excludes extension, and it appears to me that an immaterial thing can’t possibly touch anything else"
Best Explanation: The mind/body problem, Descrates response, the weight analogy, the heaviness analogy
"But doubtless I did exist, if I persuaded myself of something. But there is some deceiver or other who is supremely powerful and supremely sly and who is always deliberately deceiving me. Then too there is no doubt that I exist...
Descartes Meditation II
Explanation: The set-up for this, Cognito (Essence is thinking), Sum Res Cogitans (Objects have essences), Wax Analogy (these essences are knowable even when other facts are in doubt)
"Does the same wax still remain? I must confess that it does; no one denies it; no one thinks otherwise"
Descrates Meditation II
Best Explanation: Explains the wax analogy and relates this to how Descartes can have an essence of a thinking thing.
"From what source then, do I derive my existence? Why, from myself, or my parents, or from whatever other things there are less perfect than God"
Descartes Meditation III
Explanation: Descartes is finite, parents are infinite regress, can't be non-perfect, and have the idea of perfection
"For they are obligated to admit that God understands an infinite number of creatable things which nevertheless he can never create. if this were not so, if he were to create all the things he understands, he would exhaust his omnipotence, according to them, and render himself imperfect...I cannot imagine anything more absurd."
Spinoza prop 17
Best explanation: How Spinoza solves the problem of omnipotence, the problem of evil, and the idea of God's will, how reality limits things
How do we think that the weight of a rock moves the rockdownwards·? We don’t think that this happens through a real contact of one surface against another ·as though the weight was a hand pushing the rock downwards·! But we have no difficulty in conceiving how it moves the body, nor how the weight and the rock are connected, because we find from our own inner experience that we ·already· have a notion that provides just such a connection. But I believe we are misusing this notion when we apply it to weight—which, as I hope to show in my Physics, is not a thing distinct from the body that has it. For I believe that this notion was given to us for conceiving how the soul moves the body
Descrates/Elizabeth letters
Best Explanation: Mind/body problem, Descrtes' answer to the mind/body problem
"Next, as I focus more closely on myself and inquire into the nature of my errors, I note that these errors depend on the simultaneous concurrence of two causes: the faculty of knowing that is in me and the faculty of choosing, that is, the free choice of the will"
Descartes Meditation IV
Best Explanation: How we get error, why this is important for Descartes' concept of God and radical doubt, why we shouldn't complain that God didn't make us perfect
"They say that if corporeal substance is infinite, suppose it to be divided into two parts. Each of these parts will be either finite or infinite. If the former, then the infinite is made up of two finite parts, which is absurd. If the latter, then there an infinite which is twice as great as another infinite, which is also absurd"
Spinoa Proposition 15 Scholium
Best Explaination: How this relates to Descartes conception of the infinite, how Spinoza resolves it.
"I fail to see how God could be understood as a deceiver, if these ideas were to issue from a source other than corporeal things"
Descartes Meditation VI
Best Explanation: Descartes proof for the existence of the external world
"For although the idea of substance is in me by virtue of the fact that I am a substance, that fact is not sufficient to explain my having the idea of infinite substance, since I am finite, unless this idea proceeded from some substance that which really was infinite"
Descrates Meditation III
Best explanation: Cosmological proof for the existence of God, the finite cannot create the infinite either in formal reality or objective reality
"I first examine the difference between imagination and pure intellection. So, for example, when I imagine a triangle, I not only understand that it is a figure. bounded by three lines, but at the same time I also envisage with the mind's eye those lines as if they were present; and this is what I call imagination"
Descartes Meditation IV
Best Explanation: The difference between intellect and imagination, and how this relates to Descartes' proof for the external world
"Indeed, it is for this reason, and this reason only, that truth might have evaded mankind forever had not Mathematics, which is concerned not with ends but only with essences and properties of figures, revealed to men a different standard of truth"
Spinoza Appendix
Best explanation: Why people believe in miracles, why they shouldn't
"But there is. sophism lurking here. From the fact that I am unable to think of a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that a mountain or a valley exists anywhere...Nut from the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God"
Descrates Meditation V
Best explanation: Ontological Proof for the Existence of God, clear and distinct ideas, how God is different from other objects
You must notice that, in these first mansions, there comes little of that light which diffuses itself from the palace wherein the King resides; for they are not dark and black, as is the case when the soul is in mortal sin, yet they are in some degree obscured, so that the light cannot enlighten him who is in these rooms; and this is not through any fault of the room (I know not how to explain myself), but because so many noxious things, such as serpents, lizards, vipers, and venomous creatures enter with him, so as to hinder him from perceiving the light; just as if one should come into a place where the sun shone much, but his eyes were..
St. Teresa Mansion I
Best Explanation: Problem of evil and deception, methods of knowing, where lack of knowledge comes from, truth=goodness