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 project of Pure Enquiry to snatch certain, indubitable foundations for knowledge. By subjecting everything to doubt Descartes hoped to discover whatever was immune to it. In order to best understand how and why Descartes builds his epistemological system up from his foundations in the sort 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 distinct influences on Descartes, three conflicting world-views that fought for prominence in his day. The first was what remained of the mediaeval scholastic philosophy, more often than not based on Aristotelian science and Christian theology. Descartes had been taught accordin g to this brain 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 sudden conflict 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 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 forget close to trying to discover the personality 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 cer tain 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 failure - the particular 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 philosophical system 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 Desca rtes Father of Modern Philosophy. Open University Press, 1971. Sorrell, Tom Descartes Reason and Experience. Open University Press, 1982. The Oxford go with 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