Organon F

Volume 32, November 2025, Issue 4, Pages 421–456

ISSN 2585-7150 (online)

This paper develops and defends an essentialist bimodal (or biessentialist) interpretation of Descartes’ Creation Doctrine. The two modalities express facts about essences: i-modalities express relations of compatibility/entailment as obtaining between propositions and the essences of created things, while o-modalities express such relations with God’s essence. On this reading, the necessity of eternal truths should be understood as i-necessity, while the possibility with which God could have made the eternal truths false should be understood as o-possibility. I argue that this is a plausible reading of the central texts, and that it renders the creation doctrine coherent while improving on some previous accounts.

Descartes; metaphysics; modal voluntarism; essence.

Author

Andrew Tedder

Affiliation

Ruhr University Bochum

Address

Department of Philosophy I, Ruhr University Bochum, Universitätsstraße 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany

E-mail

ajtedder.at@gmail.com 

Received

15 August 2024

Accepted

9 June 2025

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

APA

Tedder, A. (2025). An Essentialist Bimodal Interpretation of Descartes’ Creation Doctrine. Organon F, 32(4), 421–456. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2025.32403

Chicago

Tedder, Andrew. 2025. "An Essentialist Bimodal Interpretation of Descartes’ Creation Doctrine." Organon F 32 (4): 421–456. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2025.32403

Harvard

Tedder, A. (2025). An Essentialist Bimodal Interpretation of Descartes’ Creation Doctrine. Organon F, 32(4), pp. 421–456. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2025.32403

© Andrew Tedder

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