IN THIS LESSON

Descartes responds to radical uncertainty with an audacious plan: find one belief so secure that nothing—not even deception itself—can shake it.

Topics Discussed:

  • The historical and intellectual crises of early 17th-century Europe that shaped Descartes’ project

  • The motivation behind Descartes’ method of doubt as a response to skepticism

  • The regress problem and why it pressures philosophers toward foundationalism

  • Descartes’ strategy of withholding belief from anything that can be doubted

  • Arguments from sense deception, dreaming, and the evil demon

  • Why even mathematics and logic become targets of radical doubt

  • The search for indubitable foundations as the starting point for knowledge

  • How Descartes’ internal, first-person approach marks a turning point in modern epistemology

Focus Questions

  • What historical and intellectual conditions made radical doubt feel like a serious philosophical problem rather than a mere thought experiment?

  • Why does Descartes believe that doubt can be a productive method for achieving knowledge rather than an obstacle to it?

  • What is the regress problem, and how does it motivate Descartes’ search for indubitable foundations?

  • How do arguments from sense deception and dreaming challenge our everyday assumptions about knowledge?

  • Why does Descartes introduce the evil demon hypothesis, and what additional doubts does it raise beyond the dream argument?

  • What kinds of beliefs survive each stage of Descartes’ method of doubt, and which are eliminated?

  • Why are mathematical and logical truths not exempt from Descartes’ skeptical challenges?

  • How does Descartes’ turn inward toward the thinking subject mark a shift in the history of epistemology?

Reading List

Lorraine Daston & Elizabeth Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

Richard DeWitt, Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science.

John Greco (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism

Morris Kline, Mathematics for the Nonmathematician

Matt Lawrence, Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy

Michael Shenefelt & Heidi White, If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic

Phil Washburn, Philosophical Dilemmas: A Pro and Con Introduction to the Major Questions and Philosophers.

Michael Williams, Scepticism and the Context of Philosophy. Philosophical Issues, 14, 456-475.