Descartes:00009

While it is of course very likely that Descartes studied the standard material, from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Francisco Sua´rez, he was also educated in an atmosphere permeated by the use of Pyrrhonian (sceptical) arguments in the intellectual war between Catholics and Protestants. This war involved debates over the role of the church, how to decide which church was the ‘‘true’’ one, the interpretation of scripture, and even how to determine which book was the Bible. Among Descartes’s teachers was Franc¸ois Veron, one of the leading combatants and highly skilled in the use of the weapons provided by the Pyrrhonists. Exposure to scepticism seems to have made Descartes a fierce antisceptic.