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Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy
Founders of Modern Philosophy
Lecture 2
In a letter to a friend, Descartes admits that someone
might find fault with his new book, Meditations on First
Philosophy, on the grounds that it cannot possibly be
worth the trouble ‘reheating that old cabbage: ancient
skepticism.
What’s skepticism?
I don’t know. Or:
I don’t know whether I know. Or:
It’s impossible to know.
A quote from Richard Popkin:
“One of the main avenues through which the sceptical views
of antiquity entered late Renaissance thought was a central
quarrel of the Reformation, the dispute over the proper
standard of religious knowledge, or what was called ‘the
rule of faith’.”
How does one interpret Holy Scripture properly? What is
the criterion by which the correct reading will be known?
The Catholic Church: what the Pope (and councils) say the
text means, is the criterion of what it means.
The Protestants: what the individual’s conscience says the
text means, is the criterion of what it means.
Martin Luther, from The Babylonish Captivity of the
Church:
“I saw that the Thomist opinions, whether they be
approved by pope or by council, remain opinions and do
not become articles of faith, even if an angel from heaven
should decide otherwise. For that which is asserted
without the authority of Scripture or of proven revelation
may be held as an opinion, but there is no obligation to
believe it.”
“. . . In order to decide the dispute which has arisen about
the criterion, we must possess an accepted criterion by
which we shall be able to judge the dispute; and in order to
possess an accepted criterion, the dispute about the
criterion must first be decided. And when the argument
thus reduces itself to a form of circular reasoning the
discovery of the criterion becomes impracticable, since we
do not allow them [Dogmatic philosophers] to adopt a
criterion by assumption, while if they offer to judge the
criterion by a criterion we force them to a regress ad
infinitum.” - Sextus Empiricus
Thus, the holy wars that raged across Europe for a century
and a half. (For lack of a criterion, a continent was
wrecked.) [The Thirty Years War, 1618-1648.]
Rene Descartes, from Discourse on the Method
I was, at that time, in Germany, whither the wars,
which have not yet finished there, had called me, and
as I was returning from the coronation of the Emperor
to join the army, the onset of winter held me up in
quarters in which, finding no company to distract me,
and having, fortunately, no cares or passions to
disturb me, I spent the whole day shut up in a room
heated by an enclosed stove, where I had complete
leisure to meditate on my own thoughts.
Among these one of the first I examined was that often
there is less perfection in works composed of several
separate pieces and made by different masters, than in
those at which only one person has worked. So it is that
one sees that buildings undertaken and completed by a
single architect are usually more beautiful and better
ordered than those that several architects have tried to put
into shape, making use of old walls which were built for
other purposes. . .
. . . So it is that these old cities which, originally only
villages, have become, through the passage of time, great
towns, are usually so badly proportioned in comparison with
those orderly towns which an engineer designs at will on
some plain that, although the buildings, taken separately,
often display as much art as those of the planned towns, or
even more, nevertheless, seeing how they are placed, with
a big one here, a small one there, and how they cause the
streets to bend and to be at different levels, one has the
impression that they are more the product of chance than
that of a human will operating according to reason. . .
. . . And so I thought that the knowledge we acquire in
books, at least that based on reasoning which is only
probable and for which there is no proof, being composed
and enlarged little by little by the opinions of many different
people, does not approach the truth as closely as the
simple reasoning of a man of good sense concerning
things which he meets. So, finally, I thought that as we
have all been children before being men, and that we have
had to be governed for a long time by our appetites and
our teachers, the ones being often in opposition to the
others and neither perhaps always giving us the best
advice, it is almost impossible that our judgements be as
rational or as sound as they would have been if we had
had the full use of our reason from the moment of our birth,
and if we had never been guided by anything else.”
“It is true that we have no example of a people demolishing all
the houses in a town for the sole purpose of rebuilding them in a
different way to make the streets more beautiful; but one does
see many people knock down their own in order to rebuild them,
and that even in some cases they have to do this because the
houses are in danger of falling down and the foundations are
insecure. With this example in mind, I felt convinced that it
would be unreasonable for an individual to conceive the plan of
reforming a State by overthrowing it in order to set it up again, or
even to reform the body of the sciences or the order established
in our schools for teaching it, but that, on the other hand, as far
as all the opinions I had accepted hitherto were concerned, I
could not do better than to undertake once and for all to be rid of
them in order to replace them afterwards either by better ones,
or even by the same, once I had adjusted them by the plumbline of reason.” (p. 37)
The three principles of Descartes provision morality.
1. “Obey the laws and customs of my country, firmly
preserving the religion into which God was good
enough to have me instructed from childhood, and
governing myself in all other matters according to the
most moderate opinions and those furthest from
excess.”
2. If you are lost in the woods, keep walking in a
straight-line until you get somewhere civilized.
3. “Try always to conquer myself rather than fortune,
and to change my desires rather than the order of the
world.” (p. 45-47.)
Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
“Near these [the lawyers] march the scientists, reverenced for
their beards and the fur on their gowns, who teach that they alone
are wise while the rest of mortal men flit about as shadows. How
pleasantly they dote, indeed, while they construct their
numberless worlds, and measure the sun, moon, stars, and
spheres as with thumb and line. They assign causes for lightning,
winds, eclipses, and other in explicable things, never hesitating a
whit, as if they were privy to the secrets of nature, artificer of
things, or as if they visited us fresh from the council of the gods.
Yet all the while nature is laughing grandly at them and their
conjectures. For to prove that they have good intelligence of
nothing, this is a sufficient argument: they can never explain why
they disagree with each other on every subject. Thus knowing
nothing in general, they profess to now all things in particular;
though they are ignorant even of themselves, and on occasion do
not see the ditch or the stone lying across their path. . .
When they especially disdain the vulgar crowd is when they
bring out their triangles, quadrangles, circles, and
mathematical pictures of the sort, lay one upon the other,
intertwine them into a maze, then deploy some letters as if in
line of battle, and presently do it over in reverse order-and all
to involve the uninitiated in darkness. Their fraternity does
not lack those who predict future events by consulting the
stars, and promise wonders even more magical; and these
lucky scientists find people to believe them.”
[Anecdote concerning the head of the hospital in Paris.]
“[In 1628] A large number of the leading savants of the time.
. . Were there to hear a talk by a strange chemist,
Chandoux, an expert on base metals, who was executed in
1631 for counterfeiting currency. . . Whatevever Chandoux
said, whether it was Pyrrhonistic or materialistic, almost
everyone present applauded his views, except Descartes.
Cardinal Berulle. . . Noticed this and asked what Descartes
thought of the speech ‘which had seemed so lovely to the
audience.’. . .
[Descartes attacked] the fact that the speaker and the
audience were willing to accept probability as the
standard of truth, for if this were the case, falsehoods
might actually be taken as truths. To show this,
Descartes took some examples of supposedly
incontestable truths, and by some arguments even
more probable than Chandoux, proved that they were
false. Next, he took what was alleged to be a most
evident falsehood, and by probable argument made it
appear to be a plausible truth.”
“I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six
Meditations contain the entire foundations for my
physics. But it is not necessary to say so, if you
please, since that might make it harder for those who
favor Aristotle to approve them. I hope that those who
read them will gradually accustom themselves to my
principles and recognize the truth in them before they
notice that they destroy those of Aristotle.” - Descartes
to Mersenne
Descartes’ Method:
1. Never accept anything doubtful.
2. Divide each difficulty into as many parts as possible.
3. Conduct my thought in an orderly way.
4. Make complete enumerations and general reviews.
Method
Epistemology
Metaphysics
Science