A Metaphysical Element in Descartes and the First Cartesians: Non-Univocal Predication

Abstract

ABSTRACT Descartes’ physics is dependent on his metaphysics, which is to say, on knowledge of the nature of God and of the human soul. This is clear throughout Descartes’ work, but it is especially so in the Principles of Philosophy, where Descartes devotes the first part of the treatise to the Principles of Human Knowledge, including God, the soul, and such common notions as substance (that is, the elements of metaphysics he initially discussed in Discourse on Method Part IV and elaborated in the Meditations). But here it is also possible to see a problem with those foundations. Descartes judges that what is said of substance is not said “univocally” of God and of his creatures. However, the negation of univocal predication is ambiguous as to whether it entails analogical or equivocal predication. Descartes is normally considered as holding for analogy, yet with the evidence for this construal being weak (and the Meditations not being definitive in this respect), I investigate how some of the first Cartesians, Antoine Le Grand and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, among others, interpreted Descartes’ view, to see whether the scales might be tipped in favor of analogy or of equivocation.