| Summary: | Descartes introduced his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths in 1630 in a set of letters to Mersenne. The doctrine states that God freely created the eternal truths – logical, mathematical truths and principles of physics. The point of this thesis is to provide a sympathetic examination of this doctrine. In this thesis, I shall show that this doctrine relies on Descartes’s specific assumptions about freedom, omnipotence, causality and modality. In the first part, I start by introducing the tenets of Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. I then identify Descartes’s medieval background and argue that Descartes developed his doctrine in opposition to Suarez’s. Then, I examine what Descartes means by total and efficient cause, namely God’s act of creation. Following that, I examine what Descartes means by saying that God freely creates the world or the eternal truths. The second part is dedicated to understanding Descartes’s views of modality. I show that interpretations of Descartes’s view in the light of universal possibilism, weak possibilism and conceptualism are problematic. I introduce my own account of Descartes’s position. I first show that, according to Descartes, God cannot make something that conflicts with our conception. I then show that there are grounds for conjecturing that there are two kinds of eternal truths, the uncreated and the created one, and that possible beings have an objective reality.
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