BRUNO GONÇALVES MOREIRA

Course
Master's degree
Research title
The concept of idea in Descartes
Research abstract

Throughout his work, Descartes makes a division between, on the one hand, the idea as a mode of thinking and, on the other, an idea endowed with objective reality. This division appears more than once, however, the most explicit of them, from the Preface to the reader of the Meditations on First Philosophy, is made with the intention of solving a problem: how does the limited subject have in him the idea of a supremely perfect and infinite (God)? From this question, the objective of this dissertation is to analyze if, for Descartes, in all his work, there is only one way of understanding the idea, namely, as a mode of thinking that is endowed with objective reality, or, on the other hand, if there is more than one concept of idea, of which one concerns the mode of thought and the other, completely distinct from the first, concerns the object inserted in the intellect. For this, always starting from Meditation III, the analysis extends into four points: first, the analysis of the idea as a genre, since the idea is a mode and/or an action of thought; second, analysis of the reality of the idea as a mode of thinking, that is, of the formal reality of the idea; third, analysis of the objective reality of the idea and the possible independence between the idea endowed with objective reality and the idea endowed with formal reality; and, finally, the analysis of the nature of the idea, that is, of the most elementary and general function of the idea, which we defend to be the function of perception.

Graduate Advisor
Homero Silveira Santiago
Funding
CAPES
Date of defense
29/03/2023