Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

difficulties. If God puts an illusion of reality into everyone's minds then in a sense God forces reality upon us. In what way are individuals free to determine their own actions? Anything that I choose to do in terms of changing things in the world must simply be an illusion from God.

For idealism to be true, there has to be the supposition of individual minds — and then, probably, also the supposition of autonomous individual minds — and then, probably, bodies carrying brains situated in space and time. In other words, there still seems to be the need for an underlying reality in order to support our illusions!

Suggesting that God solves the various problems of idealism (as Berkeley did) leads to the third view of truth given above, which is that all of reality — including our own minds — is just an idea in the mind of God. In this sense people do not own themselves at all. Once again there is no free will — everything that is done is just God's thought.

The fourth option described above — namely that there is an objective reality but it can never be experienced as it really is — gets us into a discussion of form, substance, substrate and essence.

Some modern philosophers are dismissive of these terms and will, in any case, suggest that ancient philosophers used them in ambiguous and contradictory ways. There is some contradiction and ambiguity, as we will see, but nonetheless I think the exploration is

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