Frederick Mills

Introduction to Rene Descartes’ Theory of Knowledge Part I

Rene Descartes’ theory of knowledge is a form of indirect realism. Descartes argues that we can form a clear and distinct idea, mediated by our perceptual experience and the abstraction of primary qualities (motion, number, extension, shape), of the extra mental features of the physical world. For Descartes, we do not, therefore, have direct perceptual contact with the extramental physical world. It is only by means of the representation of that world in the idea, that is, in the mind, that we have any knowledge of the world.

Introduction to Plato’s Ethics. On Justice in the Soul.