Abstract

This paper deals with the so-called Cartesian ‘epistemological turn’. Taking the old term ‘idea’ to be the core of his metaphysics, Descartes deployed it in a new way. In fact, Descartes broke with the traditional Platonic-Augustian conception of ‘ideas’ as ontological beings. In his view, ideas are mental or psychological entities. Descartes advances this position in accordance with a revolutionary theory of perception and a new conception of mind, both outcomes of his denial of scholastic empiricism. What emerges from this is a revival of the doctrine of innate ideas, which shapes the philosophical debates in the second half of the seventeenth-century and is responsible for the rise of epistemology or theory of knowledge as an autonomous discipline.