How Descartes Tries to Extricate Himself from the Skeptical Doubts He H

How Descartes Tries to Extricate Himself from the Skeptical Doubts He Has RaisedAll page references and quotations from the Meditations are taken from the 1995 Everyman edition In the Meditations, Descartes embarks upon what Bernard Williams has called the toil of Pure Enquiry to discover certain, indubitable foundations for knowledge. By subjecting everything to doubt Descartes hoped to discover whatever was immune to it. In order to best(p) find how and why Descartes builds his epistemological system up from his foundations in the way that he does, it is helpful to gain an understanding of the intellectual background of the 17th century that provided the motivation for his work. We can discern three perspicuous influences on Descartes, three conflicting world-views that fought for prominence in his day. The first was what remained of the mediaeval scholastic philosophy, largely based on Aristotelian science and Christian theology. Descartes had been taught match to this outloo k during his time at the Jesuit college La Flech_ and it had an important influence on his work, as we shall see later. The second was the scepticism that had made a explosive impact on the intellectual world, mainly as a reaction to the scholastic outlook. This scepticism was strongly influenced by the work of the Pyrrhonians as handed vote down from antiquity by Sextus Empiricus, which claimed that, as there is never a reason to believe p that is better than a reason not to believe p, we should choke up about trying to discover the nature of reality and live by appearance alone. This attitude was best exemplified in the work of Michel de Montaigne, who mockingly dismissed the attempts of theologians and scientists to understand the nature of God and the universe respectively. Descartes felt the force of sceptical arguments and, while not being sceptically disposed himself, came to believe that scepticism towards knowledge was the best way to discover what is certain by applying sceptical doubt to all our beliefs, we can discover which of them are indubitable, and thus form an adequate foundation for knowledge. The third world-view resulted largely from the work of the new scientists Galileo, Copernicus, Bacon et al. Science had finally begun to assert itself and shake off its dated Aristotelian pr... ...dged by us as a bereavement - the fact that he addressed topics of great and lasting interest, and provided us with a method we can both understand and utilise fruitfully, speaks for itself. Bibliography 1. Descartes, Ren_ A Discourse on Method, Meditations and Principles of Philosophy trans. John Veitch. The Everymans Library, 1995. Descartes, Ren_ The Philosophical Writings of Descartes volume I and II ed. and trans. John Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch. Cambridge, 1985. Frankfurt, Harry Demons, Dreamers and Madmen. Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. Curley, Edwin Descartes Against the Skeptics. Oxford, 1978. Vesey, Godfrey Descartes Father of Modern Philoso phy. pass around University Press, 1971. Sorrell, Tom Descartes Reason and Experience. Open University Press, 1982. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford University Press, 1985. Cottingham, John Descartes. Oxford, 1986. Williams, Bernard Descartes The Project of Pure Enquiry. Harmondsworth, 1978. Russell, Bertrand The History of Western Philosophy. George Allen and Unwin, 1961. 11. Kripke, Saul Naming and Necessity. Oxford 1980. Word Count 4577