Abstract
This chapter considers how certain tensions in Descartes’s account of eternal truths and immutable essences are reflected in later debates among his followers. The dialectic involves three different accounts of such truths and essences. The first is a form of Platonism in Malebranche that saves the eternity and immutability of the essences and truths by grounding them in God’s uncreated ideas. The second Cartesian view is a form of conceptualism in Arnauld that grounds our knowledge of truths concerning essences in our own ideas. Arnauld embraced the consequence of this view that these truths lack the sort of eternality and immutability that truths possess in the divine intellect. The third is the view in Regis—which he took to be required by Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths—that eternal truths concerning the created world are grounded in eternal and immutable features of that world.
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