Concepts and Ideas in Suárez, Descartes and Beyond

Descartes and many of his followers sought to overcome the scholastic Aristotelian tradition. This attitude is also visible in their choice of terminology: while late scholastic philosophers described the operations of the intellect in terms of concepts, Descartes and many philosophers after him described our cognitive activities in terms of ideas. This leads to at least three questions: (1) What did late scholastic authors take concepts and ideas to be? (2) Why did Descartes prefer to articulate his theory of thought in terms of ideas rather than concepts? And (3) how did Descartes’s choice to articulate his theory of thought in terms of ideas shape his conception of thought? In this chapter I seek to answer these questions with reference especially to Francisco Suárez and Descartes, but also more briefly to John Locke and Nicholas Malebranche, who developed Descartes’s theory of thought in terms of ideas in interestingly different ways.