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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
So many times have we heard it told and even recounted it ourselves, that the tale of Descartes’ metaphysical adventure is something we can slip our philosophical feet into without feeling the slightest pinch. The story, or perhaps, only its plot, is this: Descartes, in order to discover whether anything is certain, attempted to doubt everything; though he succeeded in casting at least a shadow of doubt on vast areas of belief, happily one item, though only one, emerged from the inquiry in a respectable condition, indubitable. The remainder of the tale relates how he proceeded to deduce truth after truth from that single original certainty.
1 Discourse II, Anscombe, Elizabeth and Geach, Peter Thomas Descartes: Philosophical Writings (London, 1954; hereafter referred to as A.G.), p. 18.Google Scholar
2 Meditaions I, A. G., p. 61.
3 Kenny, Anthony Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York, 1968).Google Scholar
4 Ibid., pp. 20–21.
5 Meditations III, A. G., p. 81.
6 Ibid., p. 79.
7 Objections VI, Haldane, E. S. and Ross, G. R. T. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, corrected ed. (Cambridge, 1931; hereafter referred to as H.R.), II, p. 234.Google Scholar
8 Principles I, 10, H.R. I, p. 222; the initial statement is in Reply VI, H.R. II, p. 241; Descartes also incorporated this material into The Search After Truth, H.R. I, p. 323-325.
9 Meditations I, A.G., p. 61.
10 Ibid., p. 61. Throughout I Shall ignore Descartes’ Russellian distinction between “from the senses” (knowledge by acquaintance) and “by means of the senses” (knowledge by description).
11 For typical discussions of Descartes’ claim see Beck, L. J. The Metaphysics of Descartes (London, 1965)Google Scholar, Pt. II, Chapter 1; and Kenny, Chapter 2.
12 To my knowledge only Beck has had an inkling that this problem exists. See op. cit. pp. 56 and 64, where he transforms Descartes’ “all beliefs” into “most beliefs” and “nearly all beliefs.” He appears not to have noticed this alteration (he gives no explanation). but he was probably driven to it by the dim perception that there is a conflict between the claim in the First Meditation and the doctrine of innate ideas.
13 On Aquinas and the slogan see Geach, Peter Mental Acts (London, 1957), pp. 19–20Google Scholar and 130-131. On Aquinas’ empiricism see Copleston, F. C. Aquinas (London, 1955). pp. 25–30.Google Scholar
14 Discourse IV, A.G., p. 35.
15 Alexander Koyré, Introduction to A.G., pp. xii-xiv.
16 Stough, Charlotte L. Greek Skepticism: A Study in Epistemology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969)Google Scholar. This fine book is most valuable for studies in Descartes.
17 Ibid., pp. 106–107.
18 She shows the other major skeptics to be empiricists also; On Pyrrho, ibid., p. 33; on the Academic Skeptics, p. 41; on Aenesidemus, pp. 80 and 86-87; and on the tradition as a whole, pp. 147–148.
19 Popkin, Richard H.. The Hisrory of Skeplicism from Erasmus ro Descartes (New York, 1964).Google Scholar
20 But cf. also Popkin on Sanchez, ibid., p. 41; on Charron, p. 61; on Gassendi, p. 104 and p. 106.
21 Frame, Donald M. (ed.), The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, 1948), pp. 443–444.Google Scholar See also Popkin, pp. 51–53.
22 Before quitting these historical remarks, it is worth noting that Popkin does not stress, as Stough does, the centrality of the empiricist outlook in skepticism. Rather, he emphasizes the ‘problem of the criterion’, i.e. the issue of what is to be the standard by which truth is determined, what came out in Descartes as the ‘rule of truth’ of clearness and distinctness. Yet in his account of the new skeptics’ line of argument, Popkin nonetheless reveals that the problem of the criterion is a consequence of an initial empiricist position. “The analysis of sense experience, the basis for any knowledge we might have, leads to the problem of the criterion.” (p. 53) “The critique of sense knowledge leads to the crescendo of this symphony of doubt, the problem of the criterion.” (p. 52) While the skeptics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their Aristotelian opponents might well have taken the question of the criterion as central, this was because they agreed as to the basic assumption, that all knowledge comes from the senses. But Descartes is playing another game—he is interested in that shared assumption, and so for him the problem of a criterion occupies a distinctly secondary place. Popkin's account of Descartes, like that of so many others, goes astray because of a misemphasis on the ‘rule of truth’. The crucial issue for Descartes was that of empiricism.
23 For a sketch of Descartes’ education in the writings and practices of Aristotelians and Skeptics, see Popkin, pp. 176–177 and p. 70ff. In this connection, one should consult Descartes’ ‘history’ of philosophy in the Preface to the Principles in which he describes the development of philosophy as an opposition between Platonists, who for him, are skeptics and Aristotelians, who “supported the doctrine of certainty” but who erred in “supposing it to depend upon the senses”; H.R. I, p. 206.
24 All the quotes in the exposition of the First Meditation arguments are from Meditations I, A. G., pp. 62–64, unless otherwise noted.
25 Principles I, 48, H.R. I, p. 238; I have employed the French version of this passage adding to it the word ‘eternal’ which occurs in the Latin-both are given in H.R.
26 The talk here of ‘painted representations’ and ‘likeness’ reveals that Descartes is spelling out an old-fashioned empiricist thesis that having a concept is nothing more than having the ability to call up mental images or clusters of them. In the exposition of the objection and Descartes’ skeptical reply (and in later stages of the paper), this matter of images will be ignored in the interests of simplicity. One might also dwell for some time upon the similarities raised in this objection and those involved in Hume's discussion of the missing shade of blue.
27 Hardly any of this, except the use to which it is put, is original with Descartes. Sextus Empiricus, in urging the empiricist side of his program, had already claimed that our understanding that we dream of such-and-such depends upon previous perception of such-and-suches and had introduced the simple-complex distinction to smooth out the obvious difficulty: “And in the same way one who in his sleep dreams of a winged man does not do so without having seen some winged creature and a man.” Stough, op. cit., p. 119.
28 But the argument has another force which is not so readily apparent. If it should be the case that there are only appearances and if the concepts we possess are derived from the senses, then the concepts would be concepts of how things appear and not of how they are. What passes for the concept of a hand, say, would really be the concept of how a hand looks, feels, etc.
29 Meditations I, Adam, C. and Tannery, P. (ed.), Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris, 1879-1910;Google Scholar hereafter referred to as A. T.). VII. p. 20.
30 Discourse IV, A. G., p. 34.
31 Metaphysics, E 1, 1025b1-17.
32 A. T. VII, 20.
33 Ibid., VII, 21.
34 Geach, op. cit., pp. 18–38.
35 Letter of May 27, 1930, A. T. I, 152.
36 It should be surprising to those who find the essence of the demon argument to be a doubt about mathematical propositions to discover mathematics not even mentioned in Descartes’ summaries of what is in doubt at the end of the First Meditation, A.G., p. 65, and again at the beginning of the Second, A.G., p. 66. What he enumerates concerns the material world.
37 H.R. II, p. 282.
38 Meditations I, A.G., p. 61.
39 Leonard Miller in “Descartes, Mathematics and God,” Phil. Rev., LXVI, 1957, noticing that Descartes sometimes says that he did not doubt the propositions of mathematics, refers to Descartes’ doctrine of the divine creation of eternal truths as proof that they were doubted, despite what Descartes said. This won't do—no mention of this doctrine occurs in the body of the Meditations and it is only in Replies V and VI that the objectors elicit a discussion of it from a clearly reluctant Descartes.
40 The precedent for this kind of attack on reason, a questioning of its source of information, is the ancient skeptical tradition. No special objections were raised there to rational capacities. “Reason cannot make such a decision, because it has no direct access to the truth independent of sensory experience. Since the materials of thought are ultimately the data of sense, all decisions of reason are infected with the same blindness or bias that characterize experience.” Stough, op. cit., p. 80; see also pp. 33, 41’ 86-87, 148-149.
41 The Search After Truth, H.R. I, p. 311-312.
42 Ibid., p. 305.
43 (1) Prin. I, 76, H.R. I, p. 253. (2) Prin. I, 47, H.R. I, p. 237. (3) Prin. I, 50, H.R. I, p. 239. (4) Reply V, H.R. II, p. 223. (5) Prin. I, 1, H.R. I, p. 219. (6) Synopsis, Meditation I, H.R. I, p. 140. (7) Search, H.R. I, p. 312-313. (8) Letter to Clerselier, H.R. II, P. 126. (9) Prin. II, 3, H.R. I, p. 255. (10) Letter to Clerselier, H.R. II, p. 127. (11) Entretien avec Burman (Paris, 1937), p. 5, A. T. V. 146.
44 Letter to Clerselier, H. R. II, p. 126.
45 Meditations I, A. G., p. 64-65.
46 Reply V, H.R. II, p. 206.
47 Meditations IV, A. G., p. 97.
48 Principles I, 10, H.R. I, p. 222; see references under footnote #9 above also.
49 Beck, op. cit., p. 80.
50 Kenny has utterly demolished the idea that a self-confirmatory interpretation of the cogito can be supported by textual evidence. Kenny, op. cit., pp. 41–47.