Week 4 - Descartes Flashcards
‘Modern Philosophy’ usually means ‘philosophy from Descartes onwards’.
Born in France in 1596 and possessed an unusual independence of mind.
During 1629 to 1649, during his time in Holland (the country in which intellectual life in those days was at its freest), he produced work of the profoundest originality on mathematics and philosophy and also did a great deal of work in science.
He invented the branch of mathematics known as co-ordinate geometry, hence the ‘Cartesian axes’.
His most famous works of philosophy are ‘Discourse on the Method’, published in 1637, and Meditations, published in 1642.
He had been impressed with the idea that there was no certain way of acquiring knowledge. Scepticism was an important current in the intellectual climate Descartes’s time - this stemmed from the religious Reformation. After the Reformation, all sorts of claims were made about how religious truth might be found.
One thing that Descartes and others of his generation knew for certain was that historical authority was not the same thing as first-order research or inquiry.
The crucial question was this: did a reliable method exist, at least in principle, for getting knowledge and for accumulating knowledge?
He was clear from the outset that certainty and truth are not the same thing.
To put it crudely, certainty is a state of mind, whereas truth is a property of statements which usually relates to the way things are out there in the external world.
The pursuit of truth involves the pursuit of certainty.
He also had a rule, very characteristic of his thought, that you should not accept as true anything about which you could entertain the slightest doubt.
He wanted to establish that scientific knowledge was actually possible, by starting the search for truth with a search for certainty.
This led to Descartes’s methodological doubt.
He tried to find the most extreme doubt possible and under those conditions, what could still be certain?
He imagined a malign spirit (the malicious demon) whose sole intention was to deceive him as much as it could. Was there anything that this demon could NOT mislead him about?
He was wanted to find rock-hard, indubitable propositions which can function as the premises for arguments, thus providing unshakeable foundations on which an edifice of knowledge can be built.
He concluded that the demon can never deceive me in this respect, namely to make me believe that I am thinking when I am not.
‘Cogito ergo sum’: I am thinking, therefore I exist.
By thinking he meant all forms of conscious experience.
What he was really saying was:
‘I am consciously aware, therefore I know that I must exist.’
He has an indubitable proposition but initially then argues that nothing can be inferred from them i.e. any external reality such as the existence of a table.
He needs to find something in the contents of his consciousness that leads outside himself. He claims that what this is the idea of God.
Descartes claims that no finite creature, as he knows himself to be, could possibly have given rise to the idea of an infinite being. It could have been implanted in him only by God himself.
He then proceeds to the derive the certainty of the existence of the external world from his certainty of God’s existence.
Cartesian dualism
Descartes posits a world consisting of 2 different sorts of entity: the bifurcation of nature between mind and matter.
There is the external world, given to me by God on whom I can rely. But there is also me, observing the external world.
‘I must irreducibly BE thought. I can conceive of myself as existing without a body, but I cannot conceive of myself as existing without conscious awareness.
So the material which is my body is NOT part of the quintessential me.
Through knowledge of God the external world has been restored. I indeed get my body back. It then turns out that I indeed HAVE a body. But it never turns out that I AM a body.
God was indispensable to Descartes in arriving at ‘the method’. But once you’re in possession of ‘the method’ you don’t have to be a believer in God to use it.
Descartes is, rightly, said to be a rationalist philosopher. He thinks that fundamental properties of the world and of the mind can be discovered by reflection. He does not think that everything is derived from experience.
Descartes never really accounted for the interaction between mind and matter, something that Leibniz was scornful of.
