Abstract

On several occasions Descartes commits himself to the orthodox theistic doctrine of Divine Attribute Simplicity . On this view God is identical to the members of the set of His essential attributes. So He is identical to omnipotence, omniscience, and the like. This view suffers from the serious defect of entailing that God is identical to the attribute of self-identity and thus that anything which is self-identical must also be omnipotent, omniscient, etc. Moreover, the most prominent contemporary accounts of DAS have abandoned its traditional motivation in an effort to respond to criticisms raised by Alvin Plantinga. This leaves the Simplicist with a defensible view but no reason to believe it is true. I advance an alternate understanding of DAS that uses distinctly Cartesian premises to both avoid the aforementioned problematic entailment and motivate a broad range of contemporary versions of the doctrine. ;There is considerable controversy over whether or not Descartes is committed to a distinction between the truths concerning God's essence and all other truths. I argue that he is committed to this distinction and that the conjunction of it and DAS allows him to avoid the traditional charges of circularity, explain how necessary existence is part of God's essence, and defend the ontological argument against a standard reductio ad absurdum.