Assignment task:
Reading: Meditation III
1. Early in Meditation III RD distinguishes between ideas and other kinds of thoughts. From his comments, what does he mean by 'ideas' and how, according to him, do these kinds of thoughts differ from those he calls volitions, emotions and/or judgments?
2. Descartes says that there are three kinds of ideas, and one of them we are not able to produce at will: adventitious ideas. These ideas are those that Nature teaches us to believe are formed because of sense perception (and, in the case of adventitious ideas about the mind, those inner perceptions by means of which we become aware that we have a mind with a set of active and passive faculties). At one point fairly early in this meditation, Descartes considers the possibility that we are mistaken in this natural belief that sense perceptual ideas arise in the mind due to the influence on our senses of objects external to our minds. He considers a possible source of these ideas that Nature doesn't reveal to us, but which he thinks might be the source of these ideas. What does he call this possible source, and what makes it different from the source we ordinarily assign as the cause of our adventitious ideas of sense perception?