Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons^™

The Conceptual Priority Of The Perfect, Matthew Peter Zdon

Dissertations (1934 -)

The doctrine of the conceptual priority of the perfect (CPP) is the claim that the concept of the perfect is prior to that of the imperfect insofar as possessing the latter presupposes a grasp of the former, but not vice versa. The goals of this study are to provide an account and defense of the Cartesian argument for CPP, to determine the consequences of this priority for the relationship between our concepts of human and divine properties, and to explore its implications for bottom-up accounts of theological concept formation. I argue that the predicates “perfect” or “infinite” in Descartes’ version …