A Classical Bimodal Logic with Varying Essences

Abstract

Descartes (in)famously held that there are necessary truths which God, due to His freedom in creating the world, could have made false. This view, called the creation doctrine, has come under criticism for centuries as being confused or incoherent. Elsewhere I have developed a reading according to which Descartes is an essentialist – that he takes modal facts to be reducible to facts about essences. This essentialism, along with some of his theological views, lead him to countenance two different modal notions. In this paper, I consider a variant of the view I attribute to Descartes as motivating a bimodal logic with essences. I present a classical model structure capturing some of the elements of the view, and prove soundness and completeness with respect to an axiomatic presentation, and go on to consider some potential extensions.