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 atomic number 18 taken from the 1995 Everyman edition In the Meditations, Descartes embarks upon what Bernard Williams has called the project of Pure Enquiry to discover legitimate, indubitable foundations for knowledge. By subjecting everything to discredit Descartes hoped to discover whatever was immune to it. In order to best hear 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 vitamin C that provided the motivation for his treat. We can discern triple 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, largely based on Aristotelian science and Christian theology. Descartes had been tau ght according to this outlook during his time at the Jesuit college La Flech_ and it had an important influence on his solve, as we shall see later. The second was the scepticism that had made a fulminant impact on the intellectual world, mainly as a reception to the scholastic outlook. This scepticism was strongly influenced by the work of the Pyrrhonians as hand 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 about trying to discover the nature of pragmatism 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 mat the force of sceptical arguments and, while not being sceptically given up 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 argon 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 go out Aristotelian pr... ...dged by us as a failure - the item that he addressed topics of great and lasting interest, and provided us with a regularity 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 D escartes Father of Modern Philosophy. Open University Press, 1971. Sorrell, Tom Descartes discernment 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 write up of Western Philosophy. George Allen and Unwin, 1961. 11. Kripke, Saul Naming and Necessity. Oxford 1980. Word Count 4577