Cartesian Certainty and the Infinity of the Will

PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988:249 - 262., 1989

During the 1630s Descartes recognized that he could not expect all legitimate claims in natural science to meet the standard of absolute certainty. The realization resulted from a change in his physics, which itself arose not through methodological reflections, but through developments in his substantive metaphysical doctrines. Descartes discovered the metaphysical foundations of his physics in 1629-30; as a consequence, the style of explanation employed in his physical writings changed. His early methodological conceptions, as preserved in the Rules and sketched in Part Two of the Discourse, pertained primarily to his early work in optics. By the early 1630s, Descartes was concerned with new methodological problems pertaining to the postulation of micro-mechanisms. Recognition of the need to employ a method of hypothesis led him to lower the standard of certainty required of particular explanations in his mature physics.

Physics and metaphysics in Descartes and in His Reception. New York and London: Routledge, 2019

This volume explores the relationship between physics and metaphysics in Descartes' philosophy. According to the standard account, Descartes modified the objects of metaphysics and physics and inverted the order in which these two disciplines were traditionally studied. This book challenges the standard account in which Descartes prioritizes metaphysics over physics. It does by taking into consideration the historical reception of Descartes and the ways in which Descartes himself reacted to these receptions in his own lifetime. The book stresses the diversity of theses receptions by taking into account not only Cartésianisme but also anti-Cartesianism and by showing how they retroactively highlighted different aspects of Descartes' works and theoretical choices. The historical aspect of the volume is unique in that it not only analyzes different constructions of Descartes that emerged in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, but also reflects on how his work was first read by philosophers across Europe. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a fresh and up-to-date contribution to this important debate in early modern philosophy.

This paper presents a new approach to resolving an apparent tension in Descartes' discussion of scientific theories and explanations in the Principles of Philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes repeatedly claims that any theories presented in science must be certain and indubitable. On the other hand, Descartes himself presents an astonishing number of speculative explanations of various scientific phenomena. In response to this tension, commentators have suggested that Descartes changed his mind about scientific theories having to be certain and indubitable, that he lacked the conceptual resources to describe the appropriate epistemic attitude towards speculative theories, or that the presence of geometrical principles in these explanations guarantee their certainty. I argue that none of these responses is satisfactory and suggest a different resolution to the tension by examining Descartes' notion of explanation. On Descartes' view, providing an adequate explanation does not require being certain of the theories that constitute the explanans. Relatedly, the purpose of Cartesian explanations is not to discover the truth about the various underlying mechanisms that such explanations appeal to, but to support his general philosophical thesis that all natural phenomena can be explained by appealing to the extension of matter.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1999

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1997

Recent work on Descartes has drastically revised the traditional conception of Descartes as a paradigmatic rationalist and foundationalist. The traditional picture, familar from histories of philosophy and introductory lectures, is of a solitary meditator dedicated to the pursuit of certainty in a unified science via a rigourous process of logical deduction from indubitable first principles. But the Descartes that has emerged from recent studies strikes a more subtle balance between metaphysics, physics, epistemology and the philosophy of science. There is much to be praised in this revaluation, but a dangerous amount of over-compensation has gone on, particularly in the reinterpretation of the role of sceptical doubt in Descartes' thought. This reinterpretion plays down the epistemological reasons for worrying about scepticism, suggesting that Cartesian physics is what ultimately drives the introduction of scepticism in the First Meditation.

This article describes the Cartesian conception of certainty in its epistemological approach. Its main question is:"Can we really know with certainty?" On the one hand, René Descartes says that we can know with certainty if we respectively doubt our former knowledge, the senses, dreams, evil genius and even the mathematical truths. On the other hand, he argues that we can know with certainty if and only if we rely on the followingfour epistemological requirements: "evidence" about reality; "division" that deals with the various parts of the same reality; "order" helps to move from simple ideas to the complex ones; and enumeration dealing withthe relevant and holistic ideas about reality. In his epistemological approach of certainty, Descartes affirms that human reason/mind is both infallible and reliable. However, this article also aims at showing and even proving that human reason is reliable without being infallible. Since we can partially know something about the whole reality, our new epistemological approach deals with "probability" instead ofdealing with certainty.

The purpose of this paper is to explain Descartes’ views on Metaphysics. It is my thesis that one of the ways in which he influenced not only modern philosophy, but the way in which we do philosophy even today, is by turning metaphysical inquiry into an epistemological enterprise. That is to say, he made the critique of knowledge necessary prior to any consideration of existence, and what may or may not have it. In order to demonstrate this point, it is first necessary to understand Descartes’ view of Metaphysics. I will attempt to show that Descartes’ view of Metaphysics, in spite of the fact that he used familiar scholastic metaphysical terminology, actually turned Metaphysics into what is today termed Epistemology. Descartes, not Kant, was the first to perform a true critique of knowledge, and to make that critique a necessary preliminary to all questions about what exists outside our minds.

2019

Synthese , 2012

One of the chief concerns of the young Descartes was with what he, and others, termed "physico-mathematics". This signalled a questioning of the Scholastic Aristotelian view of the mixed mathematical sciences as subordinate to natural philosophy, non explanatory, and merely instrumental. Somehow, the mixed mathematical disciplines were now to become intimately related to natural philosophical issues of matter and cause. That is, they were to become more 'physicalised', more closely intertwined with natural philosophising, regardless of which species of natural philosophy one advocated. A curious, shortlived yet portentous epistemological conceit lay at the core of Descartes' physicomathematics-the belief that solid geometrical results in the mixed mathematical sciences literally offered windows into the realm of natural philosophical causation-that in such cases one could literally "see the causes". Optics took pride of place within Descartes' physico-mathematics project, because he believed it offered unique possibilities for the successful vision of causes. This paper traces Descartes' early physico-mathematical program in optics, its origins, pitfalls and its successes, which were crucial in providing Descartes resources for his later work in systematic natural philosophy. It explores how Descartes exploited his discovery of the law of refraction of light-an achievement well within the bounds of traditional mixed mathematical optics-in order to derive-in the manner of physico-mathematics-causal knowledge about light, and indeed insight about the principles of a "dynamics" that would provide the laws of corpuscular motion and tendency to motion in his natural philosophical system. [467] John .A.Schuster, 'Physico-Mathematics and the Search for Causes in Descartes' Optics-1619-37' Synthese 185 [3] 2012: 467-499. John .A.Schuster, 'Physico-Mathematics and the Search for Causes in Descartes' Optics-1619-37' Synthese 185 [3] 2012: 467-499.