Bayesian conceptions of evidence have been invoked in recent arguments regarding the existence of God, the hypothesis of multiple physical universes, and the Doomsday Argument. Philosophers writing on these topics often claim that, given a Bayesian account of evidence, our existence or something entailed by our existence (perhaps in conjunction with some background knowledge or assumption) may serve as evidence for each of us. In this paper, I argue that this widespread view is mistaken. The mere fact of one's (...) existence qua conscious creature cannot serve as evidence on the standard Bayesian conception of evidence because knowledge of one's existence is a necessary part of the background knowledge relative to which all epistemic probabilities are defined. It follows that some formulations of the fine-tuning argument (for theism or a multiverse), the argument from consciousness (for theism) and a rejoinder to the Doomsday argument are mistaken. (shrink)

Janet Broughton’s Descartes’s Method of Doubt1 is a systematic study of the role of doubt in Descartes’s epistemology. The book has two parts. Part 1 focuses on the development of doubt in the First Meditation, exploring such topics as the motivation behind methodic doubt; the targeted audience; the method’s game-like character (on her view); its relations to ancient skepticism, its reasonableness; the method’s presuppositions relative to commonsense belief; Michael Williams’s recent criticisms of Descartes; and more. Part 2 focuses on how (...) doubt figures in the constructive epistemology of the Meditations—on how Descartes employs doubt as a tool for founding knowledge. I’ll have much more to say about part 2. A careful treatment of the topics of this book has been long overdue. Broughton’s ideas are innovative, engaging, and clearly developed at every stage. The wide-ranging issues addressed remind the reader of why Descartes’s thought is of continuing philosophical interest. Throughout, her interpretation is sensitive to the exegetical concerns of scholars. This rich book deserves the attention of every serious student of Descartes. The present paper is a critical study of part 2—the more ambitious part of this highly ambitious book. I begin with an overview of Broughton’s account. Sections 2–4 contain my analysis. (shrink)

This paper argues for a novel solution to the Cartesian Circle by emphasising the important epistemic role of the Second Meditation and Descartes’ faculty epistemology. I argue that, for Descartes: doubt requires a ‘good reason’ to doubt ; whether a reason qualifies as a ‘good reason’ depends on which faculty produces that reason ; and for distinct metaphysical perceptions from the faculty of the intellect, no other faculty can provide ‘good reasons’ to doubt. The upshot of §2 is that (...) the doubts raised up to the Third Meditation do not apply to the distinct metaphysical perceptions of the intellect, and in particular do not apply to the premises of the proof of the existence of God. I present the role of God as primarily to secure clear and distinct perceptions beyond the intellect, and knowledge of conclusions when those conclusions are no longer being clearly and distinctly perceived. Finally, I give an account of Descartes’ use of ‘ cognoscere ’, ‘ scire ’, and ‘ scientia ’ as three distinct epistemic levels, providing a valuable structure within which one can see the meditator progress. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Pragmatism Redirected From Knowledge Approximated to Approximate Knowledge Technology, Standardization, and Experimental Science Measurement and Orders of Magnitude Non‐Reductionism, Hierarchy, and Complexity Action, Progress, and Moving Beyond Cartesian Intellectualism.

Há um argumento cético clássico derivado das Meditações sobre a filosofia primeira. Este artigo oferece uma formulação contemporânea padrão do argumento, pretendendo mostrar que ninguém sabe qualquer coisa sobre o mundo extramental. A obra de Hilary Putnam na filosofia da linguagem e da mente parece fornecer uma resposta a uma versão atualizada do argumento cético cartesiano. Em sua maior parte, este artigo é dedicado a uma análise e crítica das meditações anti-céticas de Putnam. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Descartes. Putnam. Ceticismo. Cérebros em (...) cubas. Externalismo de conteúdo. ABSTRACT There is a classical skeptical argument that derives from Descartes’s Meditations on first Philosophy. This paper offers a standard contemporary formulation of the argument, which purports to show that no one knows anything about the world that exists outside our minds. The work of Hilary Putnam in the philosophy of language and mind seems to afford an answer to an updated version of the Cartesian skeptical argument. The bulk of this paper is devoted to an analysis and critique of Putnam’s anti-skeptical meditations. KEY WORDS – Descartes, Putnam, Skepticism, Brains in vats, Content externalism. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Clear Perception and Seeing that Something is So Clear Perception and the Truth Rule Acknowledgments References and Further Reading.

This article demonstrates how and why "meditations on first philosophy" is an unsuccessful attempt by rene descartes to reconcile his rationalist philosophy with his apparently conflicting voluntarism and with his adherence to certain theological principles.

In this piece, I argue against the Cartesian trend of seeing persons, selves and mind as something distinct from the body. It is claimed that Descartes realized the importance of the link between body and mind, but never pursued this connection, and this then becomes the aim of the paper. Another effect of Cartesian modes of thinking is to divorce human knowledge from its material contexts, driving a wedge between mind and matter. Some forms of social constructionism (...) appear to fall into this latter trap and instead I argue for a view of persons as embodied beings whose selves are intimately connected to the body. Using the work of Bourdieu, Elias, Merleau-Ponty, and Ilyenkov, I also suggest that thought cannot be disengaged from a human body active in its world and that knowledge not only partly separates us from the materiality of existence, but connects us to it in deeper ways, as another dimension of human existence. Human beings can then be regarded as bodies of knowledge – active thinkers and persons engaged with the multi-dimensional world around them and capable of producing change. (shrink)

This chapter discusses anti-individualism—which often depicts the individual as a physical creature bounded by its skin—and how it runs contrary to the Cartesian view of the mind—which states that it is coherent to doubt whether any of one’s thoughts correspond to external objects. Anti-individualism contends that this is a conceptual truth; without objects external to an individual, that individual’s purported thoughts would have no content at all. A well-known argument presented by McKinsey holds out the possibility of proving to (...) skeptics that there are physical things. Two things have been missing from this argument, however, and they shall be outlined here. First is a thorough assessment of the extent to which the anti-individualism it relies on can be made compelling for the skeptic. Second is the application of a lesson that can be drawn from Wittgenstein to the Cartesian self-knowledge which is the other main component of the argument. (shrink)

Although Descartes has in some ways become a symbol of academic isolation, we can dispel this misunderstanding by taking into consideration the holistic nature of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes understood the various branches of philosophy as constituting an organic totality of knowledge that, because of its dependence on imagination and sensation, remains irreducible to intellectual comprehension. Ethics holds a particularly significant place in Cartesian philosophy, and this essay both demonstrates the spiritual nature of Cartesian ethics and explains (...) why Descartes saw ethics as “the ultimate degree of wisdom” so as to illustrate how we can interpret Cartesian philosophy as a spiritual practice. This takes place through a discussion of the distinctions and interconnections of Descartes’s three primary notions (soul, body, and the union of soul and body) and concludes by reflecting on the specific temporality of nobility as well as addressing several objections to Cartesian ethics. (shrink)

According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating one’s beliefs in response to anticipated experiences that seems (...) diachronically irrational. To avoid this result, the anti-Cartesian must either license an unacceptable epistemic chauvinism, or else claim that merely reflecting on one’s experiences defeats perceptual justification. This leaves us with a puzzle: Although Cartesianism faces problems, avoiding them brings a new set of problems. (shrink)

The problem of the Cartesian circle, as it is called, has sparked ongoing debate, which intersects several important themes of the Meditations. Discussions of the circle must address questions about the force and scope of the famous method of doubt introduced in Meditation I, and they must examine the intricate arguments for the existence of God and the avoidance of error in Meditations III to V. These discussions raise questions about the possibility of overturning skepticism, once a skeptical doubt (...) has been introduced. More generally, the problem of the circle resonates with recent questions about the foundations of knowledge: Must we be able to validate our methods of reasoning or of knowing before using them? If we must, wouldn't we be forever stuck at the beginning, unable to use our methods of reasoning or of knowing in their own validation? The problem of the Cartesian circle raises general questions about the validation of reason and the possibility of knowledge. This chapter examines the Cartesian circle in the context of Descartes' central project in the Meditations, to secure the foundations of metaphysics. In carrying out this project, Descartes felt the need, or adopted the strategy, of examining the possibility of human knowledge more generally. Such an examination can be interpreted in various ways. Depending on the interpretation given, the roles assigned to the method of doubt and the proofs about God may differ, thereby altering how we see the problem of the circle. We therefore need first to consider Descartes' metaphysical project along with the methods and strategies he adopted in carrying it out. Subsequently, I explain and evaluate several main approaches to the problem of the circle. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the relation of Descartes' metaphysics of knowledge to other prominent positions in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Bold and pioneering, this book makes a detailed historical and systematic case that Descartes's theory of knowledge is an elegant and powerful combination of a priori, naturalistic, and dialectical elements meriting serious consideration by both contemporary analytic philosophers and postmodern thinkers. In the course of making this case Thomas Vinci develops a broad reinterpretation of Cartesian thought that unlocks novel solutions to many of the most vexed questions in Cartesian scholarship.

The paper deals with an argument reported by Razi (d. 1210) that was used to attempt to refute the immateriality of human nature. This argument is based on an epistemic asymmetry between our self-knowledge and our knowledge of immaterial things. After some preliminary remarks, the paper analyzes the structure of the argument in four steps. From a methodological point of view, the argument is similar to a family of epistemological arguments (notably, the Cartesian argument from doubt) and (...) is vulnerable to the same objection that can be raised against that form of reasoning. The last section points out that the argument can be used indirectly to highlight the weakness in some arguments for the claim that there is something immaterial in human beings. (shrink)

The Cartesian method, construed as a way of organizing domains of knowledge according to the "order of reasons," was a powerful reductive tool. Descartes made significant strides in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics by relating certain complex items and problems back to more simple elements that served as starting points for his inquiries. But his reductive method also impoverished these domains in important ways, for it tended to restrict geometry to the study of straight line segments, physics to the (...) study of ambiguously constituted bits of matter in motion, and metaphysics to the study of the isolated, incorporeal knower. This book examines in detail the negative and positive impact of Descartes's method on his scientific and philosophical enterprises, exemplified by the Geometry, the Principles, the Treatise of Man, and the Meditations. (shrink)

There is an epistemological skepticism that I might be dreaming now, or I might be a brain in a vat (BIV). There is also a demonstration that derives the skeptical conclusion about knowledge of the external world from the premise C1, i.e., I do not know “I am not dreaming (not a BIV) now.” Pessimistic critics (e.g., F. Strawson, B. Stroud) consider that the refutation of C1 is impossible, whereas others have attempted the direct refutation of C1 (e.g., G. (...) E. Moore, H. Putnam, C. Wright), and some (e.g., F. Dretske, R. Nozick) have attempted to refute the closure principle of knowledge used in the demonstration while permitting the validity of C1. Another scholar, M. Williams, maintains that the skeptical demonstration is true only if we presuppose the epistemological premise that we choose to accept or reject at will. It seems that most critics tend to adopt a strategy that allows them to effectively avoid the skeptical consequence, thereby conceding the validity of C1. However, it is difficult to say whether their attempts succeeded, and in my opinion, they are indeed unsuccessful. This is because their concession to Descartes’ argument is insufficient. Their lack of success could also stem from the incompletion of Descartes’ own methodological doubt. The somewhat paradoxical‐sounding aim of this thesis is to show that the skeptical paradox about knowledge can be dissolved only if the Cartesian skepticism is extended far beyond the endpoint of his attempt. The argument of this thesis is based on the important arguments of Wittgenstein's On Certainty （OC）. (shrink)

Although Descartes is often said to have coined the modern notion of ‘consciousness’, he defines it neither explicitly nor implicitly. This may imply (1) that he was not the first to use ‘conscientia’ in its modern, psychological sense, or (2) that he still used it in its traditional moral sense. In this paper, I argue for the latter assumption. Descartes used ‘conscientia’ according to the meaning we also find in texts of St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and later scholastics. Thus the (...) Cartesian conscientia is, technically speaking, a shared knowledge of the specific value of our thoughts as thoughts and at the same time the cause of this value. This means that it is not itself a kind of individual knowledge, awareness, or a particular thought. Rather, ‘conscientia’ refers to the evaluative knowledge of an ideal observer. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide what I believe to be Descartes's own solution to the problem of the Cartesian Circle. As I argue, Descartes thinks he can have certain knowledge of the premises of the Third Meditation proof of God's existence and veracity (i.e., the 3M-Proof) without presupposing God's existence. The key, as Broughton (1984) once argued, is that the premises of the 3M-Proof are knowable by the natural light. The major objection to this "natural light" gambit is (...) that Descartes identifies the natural light with the faculty of clear and distinct perception, a faculty that cannot be known to be reliable in advance of the 3M-Proof. I explain that Descartes distinguishes between three kinds of clear and distinction perceptions depending on their source; the senses, the imagination, or the intellect. I claim that although the First Meditation is designed to cast doubt on the clear and distinct perceptions of the senses and of the imagination, it is not designed to cast doubt on the clear and distinct perceptions of the intellect. The "natural light" gambit relies on the assumption that the natural light, by which propositions can be certainly known without presupposing knowledge of God's existence, is to be identified with the faculty of *intellectual* clear and distinct perception. (shrink)

In this paper I examine contemporary accounts of noninferential justification in light of what I take to be the Cartesian project of building epistemology on foundations made secure by the impossibility of error. I argue that familiar abstract arguments for foundationalism, by themselves, don’t seem to motivate Cartesianism. But I further argue that there is one version of foundationalism that is more closely linked to the way in which Descartes sought ideal knowledge.

This essay seeks to contribute to the critical reception of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by tracing the Taxonomy’s underlying philosophical assumptions. Identifying Bloom’s work as consistent with the legacy of Cartesian thought, I argue that its hierarchy of behavioral objectives provides a framework for certainty and communicability in ascertaining student learning. However, its implicit rejection of intuitive knowledge as well as its antagonism between the human subject and the known object promote the Enlightenment ideal of education as (...) “intellectual work.” When embodied in the Taxonomy, Cartesian assumptions foster a fundamental disposition in front of reality that is ultimately alienating. The paper begins with an explication of the Taxonomy’s affordances and philosophical assumptions. I then identify the Cartesian elements of these assumptions, particularly the Taxonomy’s inherent mind–body dualism and primacy of method. Finally, the paper employs these elements as an explanatory factor for the predominant critiques of the Taxonomy in educational theory literature. An addendum questions the possibility or plausibility of distance from objectives frameworks in the contemporary classroom. (shrink)

Why would Rene Descartes, the father of modern rationalist philosophy, choose "meditations" -- a term and genre associated with religious discourse and practice -- for the title of his magnum opus that lays the metaphysical foundations for his reform of all knowledge, including mathematics and sciences? Why did he believe that the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, which the Meditations on First Philosophy set out to demonstrate, can only be made self-evident through meditating? These are (...) the question that Christopher Wild's book answers. Descartes discovered the "foundations of a marvelous science" through a dramatic conversion in southern Germany in the winter of 1619. The spiritual and cognitive exercises, derived from ancient philosophy and the Christian meditative tradition, which Descartes deployed in the Meditations, enable readers to discover metaphysical truths with the same degree of self-evidence with which Descartes did during his own conversion. Descartes' meditative turn, Wild argues, brings to a culmination a life-long preoccupation with the practice or craft of thinking, known as Cartesian method. By joining meditation to method the Meditations becomes the founding document for a Cartesian "art of turning," a new practice of both thought and life. (shrink)

In this paper my aim is to consider the picture of God's immediate knowledge of the mind as this appears in Wittgenstein's work, where its soundness seems to be brought into question. My argument is that the response to this denial should take the form, not of an investigation of a theological position concerning God's knowledge ("can God look into the human mind?"), but of a negotiation of the difficulties affecting our use of this picture. A great part (...) of the latter can be seen as difficulties in mastering the communicative relation between God and man which lies at the heart of the religious form of life, and which arises from the dislocation which familiar language-games undergo within it. (shrink)

At the core of the essay that follows is a set of intuitions that distinguish the mental and subjective from the public and objective. I call these intuitions Cartesian intuitions even though Descartes himself ignored some of them. I argue that some of them survive the best efforts of critics to explain them away. This, I contend, is the basis of the mind-body problem, which should be seen as a paradox, in which both materialist and dualist lines of argument (...) seem conclusive. My aim is thus to clarify and to bolster what I call the neo-Cartesian half of the mind-body paradox, to show that there really is a paradox, one that remains with us, undissolved. ;I use two forms of arguments to accomplish this. One is the Knowledge Argument, according to which there are certain things which you can know everything physical about but not know everything about and which, because of that, make physicalism false. The Knowledge Argument says that your having this extra knowledge depends on the existence of special properties called qualia, which are supposed to be separate from any physical or functional properties. I argue that the Knowledge Argument is what survives from Descartes's original critique of materialism. I defend the Knowledge Argument, or at least I defend the claim that it has not so far been refuted. ;The other form of argument is the Absent Qualia Argument. I use it further to support the case against functionalism, the approach to the mind according to which mental states are definable by their causal relations to behaviors, perceptions, and each other. Against this position, I argue that there might be so-called absent qualia states which filled the causal roles of some of our genuine mental states but did not look or feel like anything. The functionalist response to this position is that since absent qualia states cause the same beliefs as genuine states do we could never know whether we were having real states or absent qualia replicas. I argue that there is no such skeptical problem. ;At the heart of both arguments is an account of our direct reference to our own phenomenal states. Critics of the Knowledge Argument have argued that the Cartesian intuitions the argument exploits can be explained away as a result of two distinct forms of reference: roughly, the direct reference distinctive to the mental, the descriptive reference distinctive to our neurophysiological talk. But I argue that we could not refer directly to our phenomenal states unless we did so by way of properties distinct from any neurophysiological properties. Critics of the Absent Qualia Argument can argue that our direct reference to phenomenal states requires mental processing with phenomenal aspects, processing that necessarily runs outside any causal role that might be shared with absent qualia replicas. These side-effects mean that absent qualia are impossible in us. I grant that but argue that this would not rule out the possibility of absent qualia in nonsentient creatures. They might be similar enough to have states with identical causal roles to our phenomenal states; but since they would be free of experience, there would be no chance for the side-effects that make absent-qualia states impossible to realize in us. (shrink)

Locke is often credited with having refuted the Cartesian account of the identity of persons, which locates their identity in the identity of immaterial substance. J. L. Mackie speaks for many when he writes that “Locke makes out a strong case for both his negative theses, that personal identity is to be equated neither with the identity of a soul-substance nor with that of a man …”. I will argue here that Locke’s attack on the immaterial substance theory is, (...) if viewed in the standard way, not only unsuccessful against the Cartesian theory but also unsuccessful even in its own terms. We will see, however, that Locke mingles this line of argument with another one which has not to my knowledge been remarked in the literature on Locke on personal identity; this line of argument is based on a deep agnosticism about the nature of thinking substance, and of substance generally, and it does succeed against a wide range of immaterial substance theories, but not, still, the Cartesian one. At the end of the paper I will make use of these results to sketch how two quite distinct strains of seventeenth-century thought about immaterial substance may be disentangled from each other. This should make us wary of the rather perfunctory characterizations of dualism, and particularly Cartesian dualism, which have been popular recently. (shrink)

Cartesian habits of the imagination, thought to be abandoned when Michael Polanyi’s theory of knowledge is embraced, may persist unrecognised and distort interpretation of this theory. These habits are challenged by a ‘radical’ reading of Polanyi which consistently finds a paradigm for knowledge in lively research. It is argued that this is rooted in an intention which is at once and irreducibly receptive and critical, and which gives rise to the ’radical line’ of inquiry. In this setting, (...) Cartesian dualism arises when quieter knowledge, falsely represented to itself, becomes instead a paradigm for knowledge. (shrink)

This paper explicates Descartes’ theory of intuition (intuitus). Departing from certain commentators, I argue that intuition, for Descartes, is a form of clear and distinct intellectual perception. Because it is clear and distinct, it is indubitable, infallible, and provides a grade of certain knowledge he calls ‘cognitio’. I pay special attention to why he treats intuition as a form of perception, and what he means when he says it is ‘clear and distinct’. Finally, I situate his view in relation (...) to those of his Scholastic predecessors on one hand and current theories on the other. His view anticipates the contemporary ‘perceptual model of intuition’, though it is much bolder with its promise of certainty. (shrink)

[Brian P. McLaughlin] In recent years, some philosophers have claimed that we can know a priori that certain external world skeptical hypotheses are false on the basis of a priori knowledge that we are in certain kinds of mental states, and a priori knowledge that those mental states are individuated by contingent environmental factors. Appealing to a distinction between weak and strong a priority, I argue that weakly a priori arguments of this sort would beg the question of (...) whether the skeptical hypothesis under assessment is true, and that the prospect of a sound strongly a priori argument of this sort seems dim. \\\ [David Owens] Contemporary discussion of scepticism focuses on the possibility that most or all of our beliefs might be false. I argue that the hypothesis of massive falsity and the associated 'problem of the external world' are inessential to the scepticisms of Descartes and Hume. What drives Cartesian and Humean scepticism is the demand for certainty: any possibility of error, however local, must be ruled out before we can claim either justified belief or knowledge. Contemporary philosophers have ignored this form of scepticism because they doubt that the demand for certainty can be motivated. But Descartes provides a sound motivation for this demand in the Meditations. (shrink)

In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes explains several observable phenomena showing that they are caused by special arrangements of unobservable microparticles. Despite these microparticles being unobservable, many passages suggest that he was very confident that these explanations were correct. In other passages, however, Descartes points out that these explanations merely hold the status of “suppositions” or “conjectures” that could be wrong. My main goal in this chapter is to clarify this apparent conflict. I argue first that for Descartes it was (...) indeed possible to have knowledge of unobservable particles and structures, and that the possibility of natural explanations being wrong should be understood as these explanations not being absolutely certain, but only morally certain. I use the debate in contemporary philosophy of science between scientific realism and antirealism as a framework to understand how Cartesian explanations work. Especifically, I argue that Cartesian explanations rely on what Ernan McMullin calls retroduction, which is a mode of inference that justifies beliefs in concrete unobservable entities and processes, based on considerations such as simplicity, coherence, etc. This kind of justification is of common use among scientific realists. Thus, another goal of this chapter is to highlight the relevance of Descartes’ ideas about explanation in the contemporary debate on scientific realism. (shrink)

A prominent response is that Cartesian skepticism is too Cartesian. It arises from outmoded views in epistemology and the philosophy of mind that we now properly reject. We can and should move on to other things. §2 takes up three broadly Cartesian themes: the epistemic priority of experience, under-determination, and the representative theory of perception. I challenge some common assumptions about these, and their connection to skepticism. §3 shows how skeptical arguments that emphasize causal considerations can avoid (...) some suspect Cartesian commitments. §4 explores the related idea that perceptual knowledge is what I call instrumental knowledge. Drawing on that connection, §5 examines a skeptical argument based on minimal assumptions, and explains why a Moorean response to it is unsatisfactory. The problem of skepticism is still with us, and it requires a substantive solution. (shrink)

This paper explicates Descartes’ theory of intuition (intuitus). Departing from certain commentators, I argue that intuition, for Descartes, is a form of clear and distinct intellectual perception. Because it is clear and distinct, it is indubitable, infallible, and provides a grade of certain knowledge he calls ‘cognitio’. I pay special attention to why he treats intuition as a form of perception, and what he means when he says it is ‘clear and distinct’. Finally, I situate his view in relation (...) to those of his Scholastic predecessors on one hand and current theories on the other. His view anticipates the contemporary ‘perceptual model of intuition’, though it is much bolder with its promise of certainty. (shrink)

1. Those having a detailed and first-hand knowledge of Descartes’s work seem agreed that it was highly original, genuinely critical and of permanent importance in the history of thought. And though they would differ in opinion on what are the reasons best advanced in support of their estimate, a majority would seem to regard the “Cartesian revolution” as summing up what is most meritorious in Descartes’s philosophy and most lasting in his influence. They would find Professor E. Gilson (...) speaking their mind when he declares, “Sur ce qu’il y a de nouveau et de strictement original dans sa pensée, aucun doute ne saurait subsister. Descartes est la revendication personnifiée du mathématisme universel. (shrink)

This paper draws a line of demarcation between fallibilism and infallibilism. Taking Cartesian Infallibilism as a guide, it advances a picture of infallibilism whereby infallible knowledge requires, among other conditions, luminosity of a truth-guaranteeing property. Some implications for contemporary theories of knowledge are explored.

Traditionally, ‘René Descartes’ is synonymous with ‘method.’ The so-called father of modern science, he is perhaps the systematic and methodological philosopher par excellence, a fundamental motivation for his attempt to secede from contemporary thought being the possibility of establishing a universally valid method in the search for truth. In a passage in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes contrasts his method with what he calls scholastic “[r]iddles,” verbal equivocations that hinder the acquisition of knowledge. In this (...) paper I analyze this notion of riddling and the Cartesian method to posit that, finally, Descartes cannot avoid replicating the very riddles he criticizes, that his ‘revolutionary’ method only generates more riddles to be methodically solved. In short, Descartes’ method is dependent upon words but also calls for the effacement of the very words that constitute it. Words are both a methodological necessity and limitation; a double bind, there is no method without words, but, at the same time, there can be no method with words, that is, no methodo-logos. In its broadest formulation, Descartes must always at once say too much and too little. (shrink)

The skeptical doubts entertained by Descartes give rise to seven distinct theses characterizable as solipsistic, each focused on one of three general epistemological problems, that of the reality of the perceived, that of the existence of the unperceived, and the so-called problem of the existence of an external world. The skeptical challenge in each case is concerned not with absolute certainty, but with the question of whether there is any warrant whatever for bridging the evidential gap between data and common-sense (...) tenets. ;The challenge is shown to be answerable neither with pragmatic considerations nor with semantic ones, nor by appeal either to usual perceptual procedures, or to the factual presuppositions of enquiry. Coherentist criteria of fit, consilience, and simplicity are equally uncompelling and irrelevant. Detailed examination shows charges of parasitism, whether self-referential, epistemic, conceptual, or linguistic, to fail against all but one form of Cartesian solipsism, that arising from the external world problem. In particular, it appears not only that the three assumptions of any linguistic parasitism argument, to wit, the ontocentricity of language, the impossibility of private language, and the logocentricity of thought, are each false, but also that solipsistic theses may be formulated either in revised English or in imagic thought. ;The conclusion dictated is that skepticism regarding the reality and existence of everyday objects is answerable only by a rational foundationalist enterprise building on the terrain of the sensuous flux of the radical skeptic. An introspective analysis of instances of thinking, whether non-symbolic, imagic, or linguistic, and of feeling and motivation shows an indispensable element of the thinking subject to be the tactual body. The accommodation of this circumstance makes forms of solipsism questioning the reality of the observed Googolizably arbitrary, and consequently their espousal irrational. Finally, an extrapolation of an inverse probability argument shows forms of solipsism denying the existence of the unobserved to be extremely unlikely to be true. The argument utilizes a method of random selection based on free choice, the one remaining option given the proscriptions against empirical knowledge. (shrink)

Although Descartes has in some ways become a symbol of academic isolation, we can dispel this misunderstanding by taking into consideration the holistic nature of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes understood the various branches of philosophy as constituting an organic totality of knowledge that, because of its dependence on imagination and sensation, remains irreducible to intellectual comprehension. Ethics holds a particularly significant place in Cartesian philosophy, and this essay both demonstrates the spiritual nature of Cartesian ethics and explains (...) why Descartes saw ethics as “the ultimate degree of wisdom” so as to illustrate how we can interpret Cartesian philosophy as a spiritual practice. This takes place through a discussion of the distinctions and interconnections of Descartes’s three primary notions (soul, body, and the union of soul and body) and concludes by reflecting on the specific temporality of nobility as well as addressing several objections to Cartesian ethics. (shrink)

HOME . ABOUT US . CONTACT US HELP . PUBLISH WITH US . LIBRARIANS Search in or Explore Browse Publications A-Z Browse Subjects A-Z Advanced Search University of Cambridge SIGN IN Register | Why Register? | Sign Out | Got a Voucher? prev abstract next Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes A Devout Catholic? Knowledge of The Mental Thought and Language Descartes as A Natural Philosopher Substance Dualism Notes Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes Author: Desmond M. (...) Clarke DOI: 10.1080/09608780902986680 Publication Frequency: 5 issues per year Published in: British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 17, Issue 3 June 2009 , pages 601 - 616 John Cottingham: Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes's Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 40.00 (hb.). ISBN 978-0-19-922697-9 John Cottingham, in a new collection of essays, asks the question: 'what exactly did Descartes himself chiefly take himself to be doing?' (254). 1 While the question is relatively clear, and while it acknowledges implicitly that Descartes was probably doing a range of different things, the answer that is apparently proposed here emerges only on reading the whole collection. Cottingham distinguishes in Chapter 1 - which is a new, synoptic overview of what is discussed in the other chapters, all of which were previously published - between two approaches to reading Descartes. One is to see him as 'a dummy on which to drape various suspect doctrines (such as “Cartesian dualism”)' (3), which contemporary analytic philosophers have shown to be radically mistaken. Another approach is adopted by historians of ideas 'who make it their life's work to pay meticulous scholarly attention to the philosophical works of past ages' (3). Cottingham does not explicitly criticize either of these approaches, but he hints at situating his own as some kind of Aristotelian middle course between the two. Since the two reference points are dangerously close to straw men or what Cottingham calls 'extreme positions', the proposed middle way may simply combine elements of two approaches, each of which is entirely legitimate. I return to this question at the conclusion. In fact, many of these essays were intended to show (rightly!) that Descartes never held the philosophical positions that are often attributed to him. The interpretation of Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, provides a good example of how mistaken one can be: The Cogito ergo sum radically changed the way of doing philosophy … After Descartes, philosophy became a science of pure thought: all that is being- the created world, and even the Creator, is situated within the ambit of the Cogito, as contents of human consciousness. Philosophy is concerned with beings as contained in consciousness, and not as existing independently of it. (257) The only way to address such a caricature is to refer back to what Descartes actually wrote. Cottingham does precisely that, often quoting the original Latin or French texts. However, having shown successfully, by a close reading of the texts, that Descartes did not hold many of the views that are attributed to him, it still remains to say what Descartes did hold or teach about various philosophical problems that retain their perennial interest for us. This is how the question arises, intermittently, about what Descartes thought he was 'chiefly' doing, or what was his primary objective, in the course of an intellectual career that spanned three decades. However, the apparently legitimate desire to bring Descartes' intellectual endeavours into sharp focus may be frustrated by the evidence. His life and work manifestly lack the coherence or unity of purpose that one finds, for example, among many of his French or Dutch contemporaries. It is comparatively easy to 'read' the life of Gisbertus Voetius as that of an unwavering Calvinist theologian, to see Antoine Arnauld as a staunch and consistent theological defender of Port Royal, and even to interpret the obviously fragmentary contents of Pascal's unpublished notebooks (subsequently, the Penses) as an extended search for authentic religious faith, in opposition to what he perceived as the corruption of ecclesial structures. In contrast, Descartes' life reveals features that are difficult to integrate into a coherent pattern. He lived and published during a critical juncture in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Although baptized into the Catholic Church soon after his birth in the Loire district of France, he chose to live most of his life in the aggressively Calvinist United Provinces, in which other religious practices were officially (though often ineffectively) banned. Descartes may have adopted the motto from Ovid, at least early in his career: 'bene vixit qui bene latuit' (he lives well who conceals himself well), and he seems genuinely to have wished to avoid theological controversies. However, he engaged in very public controversies with so many of his contemporaries - including Hobbes, Gassendi, the French Jesuits (collectively) and Father Dinet (in particular), Voetius and the University of Utrecht, Regius, Fermat, Roberval, Revius and other theologians at Leiden - that one might conclude that his claimed preference for a quiet life was a disingenuous mask. 2 Descartes published four books during his lifetime, and wrote at least one other that he had intended to publish. The latter was his first major composition, Le Monde, which he suppressed when he heard about Galileo's condemnation by Rome in 1633. This was followed, in 1637, by Descartes' first book (also written in French), which he tried to publish anonymously by withholding his name from the title page: the Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verit dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique, les meteors, et la geometrie, qui sont des essais de cete methode. Four years later Descartes published the first edition (in Latin) of Meditationes de prima philosophia, in quibus Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstrator, which also included six sets of objections and replies. The Principia philosophiae appeared (in Latin) in Amsterdam in 1644, and was followed five years later by Les Passions de l'Ame (in French). 3 In parallel with these publications, Descartes carried on a very extensive correspondence over a thirty-year period (in both Latin and French), and preserved copies or drafts of his letters with a view to future publication. Given the range and variety of his interests, and the sheer volume of writings, published or otherwise, that have survived from his pen, one may be tempted to engage in a comparative evaluation, as Cottingham does, by selecting one of Descartes' books as his primary contribution to philosophy. Cottingham claims that the Meditations was Descartes''masterpiece' (44), 'the definitive statement of Descartes's philosophy' (45) and the 'definitive statement of his metaphysics' (68). He also describes the Meditations more narrowly as 'his metaphysical masterpiece' (259, 303) and, more broadly, as 'his philosophical masterpiece' (289), and he lists it with the Discours as one of Descartes' two 'masterworks' (280). The Principia offers some competition in this comparative judgement when it is described as 'the canonical presentation of his metaphysical views' (114), while 'the construction of a moral system … was the crowning aim of his philosophy' (231). Having pitched repeatedly for the Meditations as Descartes' primary text, Cottingham claims that its author was 'a devout Catholic' (215), that he was 'a devoutly religious philosopher' (256), and that he could not free himself 'from the influence of the long years of theological study he had dutifully completed at La Flche' (62). Accordingly, the Meditations should be read as 'in essence a work of theodicy' (220); 'what has pride of place in the construction of his philosophical system is … an appeal to God … the nature and existence of the Deity is something that lies at the very heart of his entire philosophical system' (255). Without quite saying so, there are hints here that Descartes was a devout Christian whose primary intellectual contribution was to write a work of metaphysics, in which God is central and in the course of which the author alternates between proving God's existence and contemplating God - the latter a seventeenth-century version of Bonaventure's Journey of the Soul to God. 'Descartes's attraction to a contemplative mode of philosophizing' (305) is reflected, in the Meditations, in 'the language of the soul's coming to rest in adoring contemplation of the light' (306). Cottingham also accepts the overwhelming evidence from Descartes' correspondence that he 'devoted most of his career not to metaphysics but to science' (108), although he quibbles elsewhere with those who adopt the shorthand term 'science' to describe part of what was called 'natural philosophy' in the seventeenth century (282). He also refers to the '(notoriously lame) argument for the essential incorporeality of the thinking self' in one of Descartes' masterworks (60), and he describes the 'strange, seemingly isolated world of his metaphysical meditations' (139), with its 'creaking ontology' (147), when read in isolation from the rest of his work as a natural philosopher. How should we read him, then, in the twenty-first century? A Devout Catholic? That Descartes was a devout Catholic is possible, unlikely and undecidable. He seems not to have studied theology at all while at school at La Flche, although he completed the pre-theology college cycle in the company of Jesuit students who then continued their studies in theology. Descartes consistently attempted to avoid public entanglement with religious and theological controversies, and said so frequently. 4 Given the alignments that prevailed at the time, both in France. (shrink)

In the history of the scientific revolution, Descartes is often considered as the mechanical philosopher par excellence, and opposed as such to the founder of mechanical science, that is to say, Galileo: this cliché is not without foundation, but it must not make us forget that Descartes was himself a practitioner of mechanical science. In the article "Cartesian Mechanics" I detail the meaning and reach of "mechanics" in the Cartesian corpus, and do so in three steps. 1. I (...) begin by explaining the genesis of the thesis which states that there is no difference between the physical and the mechanical; this thesis is so famous that it is often imagined that it is constituted in Descartes's first writings. But we can in fact show that the first works of Descartes and Beeckman arise from a "physico-mathematical" practice which does not necessarily imply a complete reworking of traditional physics, even if it might have favored the Cartesian ambition for a physics as certain as geometry; it was only in the late 1630s that Descartes began to systematically affirm the identity of physics and mechanics, or of "rules of motion", of "laws of Nature" and of "laws of mechanics". I then analyze the consequences of this affirmation. 2. In the second part of this article I provide a step-by-step commentary of the response proposed by Descartes in a letter to Mersenne in July 1638 to the question raised by Beaugrand's Geostatice (...) dissertatio mathematica (1636), that is to say the question of whether a body weighs more when it is farther from the center of Earth than when it is close. Compared with other texts of the Cartesian corpus, this sample of mechanics has been little analyzed (to my knowledge, the only analyses are those of P. Duhem, P. Costabel, A. Gabbey and D. Garber). This text is nonetheless extremely interesting: Descartes responds to the geostatic question in turn in terms of physics, then mathematics; even more interesting, the examination of the details of his procedures allows us to confront Cartesian statics to other writings, whether those of Guidobaldo del Monte, Galileo, Stevin, Mersenne or Roberval. 3. In the third and final section, I analyze the reasons that lead Descartes to exclude velocity from his statics, I examine the difficulties that his explanation of gravity created for statics, and conclude with the confrontation between mechanical philosophy and mechanical science in the case of Descartes. (shrink)

This volume presents twelve original essays, by an international team of scholars, on the relation of John Locke's thought to Descartes and to Cartesian philosophers such as Malebranche, Clauberg, and the Port-Royal authors. The essays, preceded by a substantial introduction, cover a large variety of topics from natural philosophy to religion, philosophy of mind and body, metaphysics and epistemology. The volume shows that in Locke's complex relationship to Descartes and Cartesianism, stark opposition and subtle 'family resemblances' are tightly intertwined. (...) Since the turn of the twentieth century, the theory of knowledge has been the main comparative focus. According to an influential historiographical conception, Descartes and Locke form together the spearhead in the 'epistemological turn' of early modern philosophy. In bringing together the contributions to this volume, the editors advocate for a shift of emphasis. A full comparison of Locke's and Descartes's positions should cover not only their theories of knowledge, but also their views on natural philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. Their conflicting claims on issues such as cosmic organization, the qualities and nature of bodies, the substance of the soul, and God's government of the world, are of interest not only in their own right, to take the full measure of Locke's complex relation to Descartes, but also as they allow a better understanding of the continuing epistemological debate between the philosophical heirs of these thinkers. (shrink)

The objective of the article is twofold: to advance an interpretation of Descartes’ position on the problem of explaining how deduction from universal propositions to their particular instances can be both legitimate and useful for discovery of truth; and to argue that his position is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of logic. In Descartes’ view. the problem in question is that syllogistic deductions from universal propositions to their particular instances is circular and hence useless as a means for discovery (...) of truth. Descartes’ solution to the problem is to claim that noncircular, useful deduction from the universal to the particular must first be based on deduction from particular truths to particular truths. I examine previous interpretations of Cartesian deduction given by E.M. Curley, Bernard Williams, and Andre Gombay. None of these interpretations fit with all of Descartes’ criticisms of syllogistic deduction and his characterization of useful and legitimate deduction (such as the cogito). I argue that the key to a correct interpretation is Descartes’ claim that implicit knowledge of universal propositions plays a crucial role in useful and legitimate deduction, and I explain how we may cash in his talk of implicit knowledge through Ryle’s notion of knowing how. Having set out a fuller explication of Descartes’ theory of deduction, I argue that it is consistent with the way people actually reason, that it helps us with problems in the philosophy of logic that have been raised by John Stuart Mill, Hilary Putnam, and Michael Dummett. (shrink)

Since Descartes, the nature of doubt has played a central role in the development of metaphysics both positively and negatively. Despite this fact, there has been very little discussion centering round the specific nature of doubt which led, for example, to the Cartesian discovery of the cogito. Certainly, the role of doubt has been well recognized: through doubt Descartes arrives at his indubitable first principle. But what can it mean to doubt the existence of the sensible world? This would (...) seem to rest upon the assumption that we have clear and distinct knowledge of the precise nature of what it means to exist and indeed of what it means to be. As it stands, Descartes’ initiates his Meditations upon certain definite assumptions that demand more thorough interrogation. In this paper and presentation, I examine the possible assumptions inherent in the Cartesian method of doubt within the first and second meditation and the manner in which this leads to the discovery of the cogito. I consider a number of essential questions in light of this: What presuppositions lie at bottom to Cartesian doubt? What is the precise nature of metaphysical doubt? What can it mean to doubt the existence of the sensible world? (shrink)

For placing the contrast of certainty and uncertainty at the philosophical center, Descartes is charged with Michael Dummett with mistakenly subordinating the study of language and meaning to epistemology. But Dummett's knowledge-theoretic reading of the certainty/uncertainty duality is as erroneous as the tradition it inherits is long. The Cartesian demand for certainty and critique of uncertainty in mature writings like the Meditations has a definite semantic character. Cartesian uncertainty, construed aright, anticipates Dummett's putatively original idea of a (...) non-reductive yet non-realist semantics for standard factual claims asserted on the basis of sense-evidence. There is an internal relation, in Descartes' philosophy, between a repudiation of uncertainty and a repudiation of a non-realist conception of the world. (shrink)

For placing the contrast of certainty and uncertainty at the philosophical center, Descartes is charged with Michael Dummett with mistakenly subordinating the study of language and meaning to epistemology. But Dummett's knowledge-theoretic reading of the certainty/uncertainty duality is as erroneous as the tradition it inherits is long. The Cartesian demand for certainty and critique of uncertainty in mature writings like the Meditations has a definite semantic character. Cartesian uncertainty, construed aright, anticipates Dummett's putatively original idea of a (...) non-reductive yet non-realist semantics for standard factual claims asserted on the basis of sense-evidence. There is an internal relation, in Descartes' philosophy, between a repudiation of uncertainty and a repudiation of a non-realist conception of the world. (shrink)