Descartes’s commitment to modal voluntarism was one of his most notorious and controversial doctrines. The reaction of contemporaries was hostility and incredulity; the reaction of modern scholars has been little different. Yet, though the issue has fomented considerable discussion and disagreement in the literature, the overwhelming majority of scholarly output has focused on questions of whether Descartes actually upheld the doctrine, or what he was committed too if he indeed did. Surprisingly, the underlying question of why Descartes would have upheld such a doctrine in the first place has gone almost entirely unnoticed and unasked. This paper proposes several possible answers to this question, each of which provides at least a partial explanation for Descartes’s attraction to modal voluntarism. The ultimate motive, however, was likely not one of positive attraction, but driven by Descartes’s anxieties over the thorny and deeply heretical implications of his conception of matter.
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