Jonathan Bennett, Descartes' Theory of Modality, The Philosophical Review, vol. 103/4, Oct. 1994, 639-667.

Descartes vertrete eine 'conceptualist analysis of modality'.

Descartes showed no awareness, ever, of voluntarism's threatening the rest of his work. Either he had a blind spot in this direction or we have misunderstood his doctrine about the necessary truths (p. 640).

Descartes behaupte zwar 'For no x ought we to say that God could not do x', nicht aber 'For all x, God could do x' (p. 643). Wilson analysiere wie folgt:

• God set up the modal truths,
• he gave us limits to conception as a guide to what the modal truths are (p. 645)

Descartes held, I submit, that our modal concepts should be understood or analyzed in terms of what does or does not lie within the compass of our ways of thinking. (...) In each of these analyses, 'no human can' must be understood in causal, psychological terms, ... (p. 647).

Siehe AT VII 150.

Given that all modal words are at bottom truths about what we can conceive, and given that God made us how we are (...), it follows that God gives modal truths their status as truths (p. 648f.).

His a priori argument for God's existence occurs not in the metaphysical context of 'Why does God exist?' but in the epistemological context of 'How can we be absolutely sure that God exists?' (p. 650).

In short, there was in Descartes a wide, deep, vivd streak of subjectivism or pragmatism about truth - a willingness to treat results about the settlement of belief as though they were results about how things stand in reality, or as though the former mettered and the latter did not (p. 652).

Siehe hierzu: Bennett, Truth and Stability in Descartes's Treatment of Scepticism, Canadian Journal of Philosophy supp. vol. 16, 1990, 75-108; Loius Loeb, The Priority of Reason in Descartes, Philosophical Review 99, 1990, 30-43.