Descartes (review)

250 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY some of the views held by Eck without explaining either their meaning or their place in the history of supposition theory. For instance, he says that Eck took merely confused supposition to be a property not only of predicates but, contrary to Bovillus, also of subjects in the case of sentences beginning with "only." Seifert does not remark that Eck was taking the standard position here, he does not tell us what merely confused supposition is, and he gives an inaccurate reference: to 'Hisp. 91' instead of 'fo. xcii verso, column B'. Seifert's failure in these respects is related, I think, to his failure to keep up with recent writings on late medieval logic, which is revealed by his very inadequate bibliography. Seifert's book will be useful particularly to those interested in details of university organization; but anyone who takes the title seriously will be disappointed by what they find. E. J. ASHWORTH University of Waterloo Margaret Dauler Wilson. Descartes. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Pp. xvii + 255. $20.00. This analytical account of the Meditations is as penetrating, comprehensive and heuristically valuable as any that exists, certainly in English. On one after another issue we are offered fresh insights that amount to the tour de force that one might have predicted of this author from her previous work. With it she takes her place among Kemp Smith, Gueroult and Alqui~ as the most important commentators of recent times. To be sure, her major thesis does not approach theirs in novelty; however, the tenacity with which she pursues it and the results she obtains seem to me unique, even if the thesis as such emerges only sporadically throughout. Her thesis, call it the Manifest Image Thesis (MIT), may be stated as follows. The primary aim of the Meditations is to upset the Aristotelian-scholastically endorsed view that material objects are as they appear to the senses, and to replace it with the scientific view that they are as they appear to reason. The methodic doubt and concern with certainty of Meditations I, for example, must be viewed as aimed at ontological issues on which the familiar epistemological issues are merely based. Thus the Dreaming Argument of Meditations I is read not as a challenge to provide a means of ascertaining whether one on a given occasion, or always, is dreaming and therefore is deceived, but rather of providing marks to distinguish waking experience alleged as veridical from dreaming premised as deceptive. Descartes's argument is not that every supposed sense experience might really be an instance of dreaming, but that unless it can be shown to differ significantly from dreaming, and even from imagining, then it like the latter ought to be regarded as deceptive and its objects as unreal. His aim, that is, is to upset sense experience and its claim to reach an objective order of reality. Descartes is thereby relieved of at least certain long-standing objections to his resolution of the difficulty in Meditations VI by means of coherence, for example, that one might yet be mistaken about the perception of physical objects since it is always possible that one only'dreams that one applies the criteria of coherence or that they are satisfied. There are many other instances of fruitful appearances of the MIT. However many questions about the piece of wax it leaves unanswered, the MIT effectively explodes the views that the point of the example concerns sortals or reidentification of individuals (see BOOK REVIEWS 251 p. 91). Additionally, it saves Descartes from Wittgensteinian arguments concerning the corrigibility of sense data (see pp. 76-77). And it allows a resolution of the problem concerning the reality of Descartes's doubts--much of what is doubted only for apparently rhetorical reasons in fact turns out to be outrightly false or at least demonstrable only very laboriously on the basis of non-empirical principles (see pp. 9-I 1). And so on, throughout the book. There are two instances, however, where the MIT is either insufficiently or misleadingly applied. Both result from an uncritical portrayal of Descartes's theory of perception along Lockean representationalist lines, namely, that (1) ideas...