JEAN-DANIEL LALLEMAND L'éthique cartésienne de la ... - Thèses

The Cartesian ethics of the thought
ABSTRACT
Descartes' work is a work of thought, which he wanted and built with method,
strictness and constancy his whole life through. Thanks to this work, we do not
discover as much the truth of the things as the way we can build our own thought and
system of convictions. And the method Descartes is suggesting and applying in the
mean time is aimed at coherence. To think truly the world is consequently the most
reliable way to think with coherence.
The subject of the study is to highlight the rules that indeed make up what we may
call the Cartesian maxim of the thought. With this aim in view, we start with the
description of what is for Descartes the thought on one hand, and on the other hand,
this world which is precisely to be thought. We are then led to examining and
criticizing the role of God's existence in the Descartes' system, which aims to
guarantee the coherence of his own thought.
However, in spite of the application of his maxim, Descartes did not avoid an error
which was to weaken his system of convictions, that is to say his conception of the
matter as pure expanse. Even if the "novel of nature" he then imagined on this
erroneous basis is coherent, it unfortunately does not represent the reality of the
world.
By introducing inter-subjectivity in the ethics of the thought, i.e. by accepting to rub
our own system of convictions to the one of the "Other", whose existence and value
we recognise, we no doubt can avoid this kind of drift. So we establish that the idea of
Man, who is both the Cartesian ego and this Other one, takes with great benefit the
place of the idea of God, in the prospect of guaranteeing the truth.
KEYWORDS : Action, Fact, body, causality, certainty, clarity and distinction,
coherence, conception, conscience, doubt, ego, essence, ethics,
expanse, faith, geometrical object, God, idea, imagination, Man,
matter, Other, passion, reflexion, substance, thought, truth.
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