THE HIGHLIGHTS OF DESCARTES' EPISTEMOLOGY (AN INTRODUCTION

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.

A Companion to Rationalism

Doubtless Descartes belongs in the rationalist tradition. Stating why is not so easy. He nowhere characterizes the view we call "rationalism," nor does he describe himself as a rationalist. His express commitment to a doctrine of innateness is suggestive though not sufficient, for some philosophers (e.g., Kant) accept such a doctrine while rejecting rationalism. Further suggestive is that he links innateness with the achievement of knowledge: We come to know them [innate truths] by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience. All geometrical truths are of this sort-not just the most obvious ones, but all the others, however abstruse they may appear. Hence, according to Plato, Socrates asks a slave-boy about the elements of geometry and thereby makes the boy able to dig out certain truths from his own mind which he had not previously recognized were there, thus attempting to establish the doctrine of reminiscence. Our knowledge of God is of this sort. (CSMK 222-3; AT 8b: 166-7) Clarifying a precise account of rationalism is not the aim of this chapter. I shall instead assume that we're on the rationalist track and attempt to develop central rationalist themes that figure prominently in Descartes' epistemology. The themes I develop center on methodist concerns. Distinguish two sorts of epistemological questions for which one might identify characteristic responses, including rationalist responses: What-questions (e.g., What particular propositions can be known?) How-questions (e.g., How are such propositions known?) Exemplary what-questions concern whether we can know, for example, the nature of being itself, or know necessary truths, or the nature of identity, causality, and so on. Exemplary how-questions concern the nature of knowledge itself, including how it differs from opinion, the origin of our ideas, the reliability of our ideas as a basis for judgment, and so on. Opinions vary about the proper direction of inquiry-about which sort of question should take precedence over the other in the process of discovery. Two broad camps have emerged. (Note that these camps do not map onto the rationalism-empiricism distinction.) According to the particularist camp, answers to A Companion to Rationalism Edited by Alan Nelson Copyright © 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd lex newman 180 what-questions take precedence. Proper inquiry begins by identifying exemplary cases of particular propositions that we know. What counts as exemplary? According to G. E. Moore, "Here is a hand" is exemplary (while holding up your hand and looking at it). These exemplary cases are then used to help sort out better and worse answers to how-questions-the better answers will have it that the exemplary cases count as knowledge. The methodist camp reverses the order of inquiry. How-questions take precedence. Accordingly, we can only correctly identify a knowledge claim as exemplary if we have already sorted out answers to how-questions. A proper such sorting might indeed reveal that Moore's celebrated knowledge claim is not well founded. Descartes is a methodist par excellence. His methodist orientation is perhaps best explained in historical context. The early seventeenth century is entrenched in dogma. Centuries of Aristotelianism having prevailed, the philosophical world is captivated by ancient authorities and longstanding traditions. If the new mechanist philosophy is to supplant Aristotelianism, a strategy is needed to effectively call into question venerated authorities and traditions, but-importantly-without directly impugning their credibility. In a stroke of genius, Descartes devises a broader methodist strategy to accomplish this. As part of the strategy, we're to carry out a once-in-a-lifetime epistemological audit-a thorough examination of the books, as it were, scrutinizing our beliefs and their basis. The opening lines of the Meditations present a simple and compelling rationale for the audit: Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences [scientiis] that was stable and likely to last.

Karl Popper argued that the observable world can surprise us. Stephen Hetherington asks, 'Is pure reason also vulnerable to be surprised, even overthrown?' This essay suggests that Descartes was not prepared to undertake this question thoroughly, and seriously.

Noa Naaman-Zauderer's book aims to bring to light the ethical underpinnings of Descartes' system: on her view, in both the practical and the theoretical spheres Descartes takes our foremost duty to lie in the good use of the will. The marked ethical import of Cartesian epistemology takes the form of a deontological, non-consequentialist view of error: epistemic agents are praised/blamed when they fulfill/flout the duty to not assent to ideas that are less than clear and distinct. Extra-theoretical realms admitting of no clear and distinct perceptions are subject to 'softer' duties of acting on the basis of the best available reasons. Since Cartesian epistemology involves ethical considerations, and since the late Cartesian ethics of virtue crucially depends on metaphysical knowledge about the nature and function of the will, Descartes' ethics is not just a fruit of his tree of knowledge but it also nourishes its own roots. Below I will briefly look at the chapters of this book tracking some of its Cartesian deontological motifs.

Descartes’ disillusionment of the kind of knowledge he received from his predecessors, the scriptures and the senses made him set out his ingenious gigantic inquiry into the basis of not just acquiring certain knowledge but purifying the epistemic discipline by reining it from undue empirical infiltration; a discipline he felt had become toxic because of the uncritical and unscathed incursion of the traditional but paralyzed over-reliance on the information received from the senses. He was obsessed with the problem of intellectual certainty. Thus, the onerous task of building an edifice of knowledge that would be fortified enough that there will be no room for truths and doubts enveloped and led him to further seek to incarcerate as incriminating, the sensible data which was guilty of deception. Buttressing his reason for this, he opines thus: “…whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise (as prudence dictates) to trust completely those who have deceived us even once… The Meditations on First Philosophy, evinces this Cartesian non-effaceable thesis. Being one of the most engaging collections of arguments in the history of philosophy, it was a masterpiece of Rene Descartes. It resembles in many ways St Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual exercises. It contains the most definitive and eloquent statements of Descartes’ philosophy. Throughout the meditations, Descartes’ primary concern was the undaunted search for epistemic certitude, but nevertheless, in the final three meditations he moves from the epistemological problem of certainty to metaphysical questions about reality. Here Descartes demonstrates the existence of God and the distinction between the human soul (i.e. mind) and body. The Meditations take the form of a challenging philosophical game. At each turn he produces a belief about which he is certain; then he uses his creative imagination to see if there is any way to see if he could be mistaken. The Meditations on First Philosophy is a vivid representation of Descartes’ thoughts.

Open Journal of Philosophy, 2012

The essay is a comparative look at Descartes' and Pascal's epistemology. For such vast a topic, I shall confine myself to comparing three crucial epistemological topics, through which I hope to evince Descartes' and Pascal's differences and points of contact. Firstly, I will concentrate on the philosophers' engagement with skepticism, which, for each, had different functions and motivations. Secondly, the thinkers' relation to Reason shall be examined, since it is the fulcrum of their thought—and the main aspect that separates them. Lastly, I will examine each philosopher's theist epistemology; this section, of course, will focus on how and by what means Descartes and Pascal set out to prove God's existence. The latter aspect shall take us back to each philosopher's relationship to Doubt: the title, " The Giants of Doubt ", in fact, implies a fundamental link between Descartes and Pascal through Doubt. In addition, and most importantly, the contrast between the two thinkers' epistemology inaugurates a decisive scission in modern thought of enormous repercussion: Descartes' sturdy rationalism initiated the great branch of modern scientific inquiry, while Pascal's appeal to the power of intuition and feelings would eventually be the precursor of the reaction to the enlightenment that invested Europe by the second half of the eighteenth century. This departure of thought, which in my view may be traced back to them, has not been the common conceit of the history of philosophy: the reaction to the enlightenment has customarily been regarded as stemming from its internal contradictions or at best from its more radical doctrines. The essay shall show that these strands of thought were both parallel and born out of the antithetical epistemologies of Descartes and Pascal.

The article advances a reading of Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy that dispenses with "clear and distinct ideas". Since Descartes's lifetime, these concepts have become a trademark of his philosophy and a target for his critics, on account of their vagueness and inconsistency. The article provides evidence that, by and large, "clear and distinct ideas" were intended by Descartes to convey in simpler, catchier terms a much more elaborate argument, ultimately grounded on the system of the mind's faculties. The article argues that, through this enquiry, Descartes meant to provide a space of reasons wherein to establish key contentions of his philosophy, to include those involving the existence of both mind and bodies. The article concludes by showing that the traditional portrayal of Descartes as an unmitigated intuitionist is, at best, one-sided.

Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza, edited by Martina Reuter and Frans Svensson. London: Routledge, 2019

This chapter explores some key issues within Descartes’s theory of cognition. The starting-point is a recent interpretation, according to which Descartes is part of a tradition of theorizing about human cognition, beginning from the idea that we are in principle capable of articulating or grasping the basic order of reality. Earlier readings often take Descartes to question whether we have any cognitive access to reality at all. On the new reading, Descartes instead defends a robust conception of our cognitive relation to reality—our cognition needs to be “determined by reality,” as John Carriero puts it. One important element of Carriero’s interpretation is that Descartes’s notion of idea is to be understood along the lines of the Aristotelian doctrine of formal identity between cognizer and cognized. Here it is argued that retaining the latter doctrine faces some difficulties, given the novel conception of the structure of reality defended by Descartes. This chapter proposes that he needs an alternative account of what it is for a cognizer to be determined by reality. Attending to some important differences between the innate idea of extension and that of God, the chapter concludes that Descartes may not have a fully worked-out account of his own. Considering some of the problems inherent in his views can, however, shed light on the, from our contemporary perspective, peculiar role both Spinoza and Leibniz give to God in accounting for cognition.

Modern Philosophy started off on the ground of the collapse of the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. Rene Descartes, the French searcher for an indubitable foundation of knowledge, started off the project of rebuilding epistemology on an unshakable foundation. His meditations consists for us, his epistemic edifice. We sought here, to examine the tenability of his efforts, without prejudice to his helps.

Dialectic: Volume XV | Issue 3 | Autumn 2021, 2021

In his essay "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science," Alasdair MacIntyre defines an epistemological crisis as when a schema for understanding the world suddenly fails to adequately do so in irremediable ways. MacIntyre critiques the work of Rene Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy as a disastrous attempt at addressing an epistemological crisis, due to Descartes’s impossible self-assigned task of doubting all beliefs until he uncovers a contextless first principle. This essay will argue that MacIntyre misunderstood Descartes’s project in the Meditations and was not able to fully appreciate his proposed solution to the epistemological crisis he faced. Understanding the Meditations through the interpretative lens of Descartes’s theological perspective, his rejection of Aristotelian scholasticism and his commitment to the new sciences of his time, provides a richer account of his project that MacIntyre fails to capture.