What Descartes Ought to Have Thought about Modality

Jonathan Bennett wrote two commentaries on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Kant’s Analytic and Kant’s Dialectic. In the preface to the latter he referred back to a review of the former: “I continue to be,” he wrote, “in the words of an unhappy reviewer of my earlier work, ‘one of those commentators who are more interested in what Kant ought to have thought than in what he actually did think.’ ”¹ Probably you, like me, find it hard not to sympathize both with Bennett and with his unhappy reviewer. What an author ought to have thought must surely be of