Descardes, Rene

Göndermeler

This sense of superiority to contemporary mathematicians coexisted with a belief that his ideas could be made plain to ordinary men of good sense. This seemingly rather odd combination of attitudes is more than an accident of Descartes’s temperament.

For Descartes, it is the case that the truth about the natural world is hidden, but it is not occult, nor are occult powers needed to uncover it. It is hidden in the form of a mathematical structure which underlies sensible appearances. It is uncovered by systematic scientific enquiry and the use of the rational intellect.

He carried such ideas into practice, teaching his servant mathematics, and strongly approving of the scheme of a M. d’Alibert to found a college to teach arts and sciences to artisans and others who wanted to learn.

It is very important that the Method of Doubt is not the whole of Descartes’s Method. It is not even the whole of his philosophical method, since, as we shall see, doubt introduces and forms the enquiry, but eventually makes way for a systematic vindication of knowledge, and an orderly reconstruction of it.

It is sometimes suggested that he has no reason; that the pursuit of certainty, in the form of indubitability, is a prejudice on his part, a gratuitous philosophical ambition, conditioned perhaps by his being over-impressed by mathematics. The last point, at least, as an answer to the present question is plainly silly, since if we ask what it was about mathematics as a form of knowledge that appealed to Descartes, the reply is its possibility of attaining certainty.

Whatever the solution to the vexed problem of the foundations of Descartes's system, and their epistemic status, Descartes himself clearly believed that if he could get as far as establishing the existence of God, 'in whom all the wisdom ofthe sciences lies hid', he could proceed to establish a systematic physical science, covering 'the whole of that corporeal nature which is the subject matter of pure mathematics' (Fifth Meditation).