Necessity and Metaphysical Naiveté in Descartes’ Meditations

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.

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.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2003

Roczniki Filozoficzne / Annales de Philosophie / Annals of Philosophy, 2020

JOURNAL ARTICLE THE HIGHLIGHTS OF DESCARTES’ EPISTEMOLOGY (AN INTRODUCTION) PRZEMYSŁAW GUT and ARKADIUSZ GUT Roczniki Filozoficzne / Annales de Philosophie / Annals of Philosophy Vol. 68, No. 2, Descartes’ Epistemology Special Issue (2020)

Philosophical Forum, 2010

Judging by the unabated publications,2 Woodruff Smith is certainly correct to observe “There is something dead right, and very much alive, about the cogito.” Of course, what exactly is “dead right” about it remains controversial. Recently, David Cunning4 suggests that the familiar passages in which Descartes insists on the indubitability of his existence “present an intractable problem of interpretation” since there are other texts in which he seems to allow that “I am, I exist” is open to doubt. Cunning notes “Some commentators have argued that in the light of these passages there is no coherent account to be reconstructed of Descartes’ view on the dubitability of “I am, I exist.” However, the text cited by Cunning in the Third Meditation6 expresses Descartes’s unshakeable certainty even in the face of an omnipotent deceiver, for “he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.” Of course, this is consistent with Descartes’s account of his certainty in the Second Meditation despite the efforts of the malin génie. Above all, the device of the deceiving demon is intrinsic to the Cogito argument as the very vehicle for establishing the indubitability of Descartes’s own thought and existence. Cunning’s discussion is surprising for failing entirely to mention the Cogito argument that is generally thought to be the locus of Descartes’s certainty. In particular, Cunning’s view that Descartes holds his existence to be “just as dubitable as anything else”7 only appears plausible if we fail to appreciate the special force of the reasoning of the Cogito. Accordingly, I propose to consider how Descartes’s indubitability may be understood in terms of the special, notoriously problematic features of the Cogito argument. Above all, my reconstruction of the logic of the Cogito as a “diagonal deduction”8 permits reconciling what Howell9 describes as “the two apparently conflicting theses,” namely, the peculiar Humean elusiveness of the self and the Cartesian certainty of cogito judgments.

Translated from: Theo Kobusch: Sein und Sprache: Historische Grundlegung einer Ontologie der Sprache, Leiden – New York – Københaven – Köln 1987, pp. 214–234.

Philosophical Studies, 1981

2006