Res Philosophica

Volume 96, Issue 4, October 2019

Arnauld's Silence on the Creation of the Eternal Truths

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, Antoine Arnauld was a public and private defender of many of the central tenets of Cartesianism. Yet, one issue on which he is surprisingly silent is René Descartes’s claim that God freely created the eternal truths (the Creation Doctrine). Despite Arnauld’s evasion of the issue, whether he holds the Creation Doctrine is one of the most contested issues in Arnauld scholarship. In this article I offer an interpretation of Arnauld’s position. I argue that Arnauld does not hold what I call the metaphysical version of the Creation Doctrine according to which God in fact freely created the eternal truths. Rather, he holds what I call the epistemic version of the Creation Doctrine according to which we cannot know whether God freely created the eternal truths.