Descartes' skeptical and antiskeptical arguments

2006

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)

2017

Enlightenment philosopher, René Descartes, set out to establish what could be known with certainty, untainted by a deceiving demon. With his method of doubt, he rejected all previous beliefs, allowing only those that survived rigorous scrutiny. In this essay, Leslie Allan examines whether Descartes's program of skeptical enquiry was successful in laying a firm foundation for our manifold beliefs. He subjects Descartes's conclusions to Descartes's own uncompromising methodology to determine whether Descartes escaped from a self-imposed radical skepticism.

Mind, 2006

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.

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.

In the beginning of the skeptical argumentation of the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes’s meditator states: “Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses”. However, since the senses are occasionally in error, she concludes that one should not trust them completely. (AT VII, 18; CSM II, 12.) The laid Empirical Principle, though not upheld by Descartes himself, is the starting point of the Cartesian skepticism and along with its preliminary questioning, sets the stage for the famous scenarios of dreaming and deceiver to follow. However, although the later scenarios have garnered much attention in the secondary literature, Descartes’s approach to skepticism based on particular sensory experience has in most readings been almost completely skipped. Part of the reason might be the anticipation to get to the more interesting argumentation. Another part of it might be the abrupt nature by which Descartes seems to treat the scenario. Despite this abruptness, I maintain that Descartes’s treatment of particular sensory skepticism is crucial to his overall argument and for the achievement of the goals in the Meditations. In this paper, I analyze the skeptical scenario of Occasional Sensory Errors or OSE, arguing for its naturality and reasonable nature, while separating it from systematic doubt of the senses. I read OSE as generating a seriously taken skeptical puzzle for the background of Aristotelian theory of cognition and pre-philosophical naïve realism of everyday life, both of which I identify as models for the Empirical Principle in the beginning of the First Meditation. I also argue that the scenario of OSE can be likewise understood from the point of view of the renaissance and early modern skeptical tradition. However, while succeeding as a serious skeptical scenario, I argue that OSE scenario is not enough for Descartes to generally doubt sensory experience and consider that the senses might be systematically in error. In order to succeed in the systematic doubt of the senses by the dreaming doubt, Descartes needs to guide the meditator from the natural common sense attitude, used in practical everyday life, to the unnatural metaphysical doubt, used in the skeptical project of the Meditations. These two should be considered two different states of mind, with the latter being the metaphysical attitude required for the Cartesian suspension of judgment.

Since the translation of Aristotle's works from Arabic into Latin in the Thirteenth century, Aristotelianism served as the undisputable conceptual framework for science until the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century, a period where we find several figures who directly challenged it from alternative intellectual frameworks: heliocentric cosmology (Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo), modern sceptical philosophy (Montaigne, Charron, Francisco Sanchez), mechanical philosophy (Hobbes, Gassendi, Descartes), medical physiology (Vesalius, Harvey), etc. On this paper, it is presented the main lines of the sceptical strategies developed by Francisco Sanchez and René Descartes, rhetoric and philosophical devises designed to undermine the epistemic trust on Aristotelian science. The main purpose of this work is to show the similarities and the difference between these strategies implemented in their most important works, That Nothing is Known and Metaphysical Meditations, focusing on the different kind of psychological doubt they want to provoke on their readers, and pointing to the striking connections between the alleged " father of Modern Philosophy " and his barely unknown Spanish predecessor. We conclude that there is a close relation between the kind of doubt they are looking for and their attitudes concerning science.

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 Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2010