René Descartes

Enlightenment philosopher, René Descartes, set out to establish what could be known with certainty, untainted by a deceiving demon. With his method of doubt, he rejected all previous beliefs, allowing only those that survived rigorous scrutiny. In this essay, Leslie Allan examines whether Descartes's program of skeptical enquiry was successful in laying a firm foundation for our manifold beliefs. He subjects Descartes's conclusions to Descartes's own uncompromising methodology to determine whether Descartes escaped from a self-imposed radical skepticism.

Argues that Descartes's commitment to mind-body causation leads to a commitment to body-body causation.

In Meditation I, Descartes dismisses the possibility that he might be insane as a ground for doubting that the senses are a source of knowledge of the external world. In this paper, I argue that Descartes was justified in so doing, and draw some general epistemological conclusions from this result.

Descartes argues that, apart from the existence of a veracious God, we can have no reason to believe that we possess reliable cognitive faculties, with the result that, if atheism is true, not even our seemingly most certain beliefs can count as knowledge for us. Since the atheist denies the existence of God, he or she will be precisely in this position. I argue that Descartes' argument is sound, and that atheism is therefore self-refuting.

I raise the question of whether there is a hidden source of doubt in Descartes’ first meditation, if one adopts the perspective of some people he describes as insane.

In this paper, I present the problem of the poor king, from combining Descartes and Rousseau.

This paper contests a standard interpretation of how Descartes comes to the conclusion that he is not his body in the second meditation. I propose an alternative interpretation in its place.

Charles Larmore presents the central part of Descartes’ first meditation as a brief dialogue between a skeptic and a sensible empiricist. I point out a source of discontent about this innovative transformation.

The purpose of this essay is to exhibit in detail the setting for the version of the Cogito Argument that appears in Descartes’s Meditations. I believe that a close reading of the text can shed new light on the nature and role of the “evil demon”, on the nature of God as he appears in the first few Meditations, and on the place of the Cogito Argument in Descartes’s overall scheme.

In this chapter, I examine similarities and divergences between Du Châtelet and Descartes on their endorsement of the use of hypotheses in science, using the work of Condillac to locate them in his scheme of systematizers. I conclude that, while Du Châtelet is still clearly a natural philosopher, as opposed to modern scientist, her conception of hypotheses is considerably more modern than is Descartes’, a difference that finds its roots in their divergence on the nature of first principles.

In May 1643 Elisabeth of Bohemia addressed a question to Descartes which inaugurated a six-year Correspondence, until his death. He dedicates his mature metaphysical work to the Princess (Principles of First Philosophy, 1644) and writes Passions of the Soul (1649) as one of the results of the dialogue with the philosopher of Bohemia. The silencing of the last hundred years of historiography on Elisabeth of Bohemia's legacy in this epistolary exchange caused distortions and, in some cases, underpinned the bias as (...) a rule and as the history. One of the consequences of this distortion is the interpretation according to which her first question would consist of a critique of substantial dualism. In this study I suggest an interpretation of the nature of the first question, in order to clarify the philosopher's thinking and her role in dialogue, in a comprehensive way, without subscribing to the literary paradigm of the Cartesian soliloquy, and its bias. (shrink)

In this work I intend to explore the textual and conceptual roots of the moral view in the Early Modern Rationalism of Cartesian spectrum as detected by Elisabeth of Bohemia. To this intent, I will drive my analysis, first, to the remark Descartes adds to his own provisional morality of the Discourse in the Letter of August 4th, 1645 to Elisabeth. Second, I will approach the two aspects of her reply to Descartes, both in her Letter of September 13th 1645, (...) which I call a) the contextual aspect – with which she excludes the hypotheses of an infinite science at the service of assessing the good and b) the self-related aspect, with which the philosopher of Bohemia address the moral objectiveness as an intrinsic practical value, obtained by the passions that may lead to reasonable actions. The upshot is a practical and affective moral view, in which the normative trait of some passions of the soul can be taken as the explanation of an intentional infrastructure of the mind, without, however, a theory of ideas as such playing an explicit role. Instead of a representational endeavor, Elisabeth of Bohemia claims a kind of self-awareness from the discovery of a passionate function as an expression of the adequate measure between happiness and morality of actions. That kind of awareness, I shall demonstrate, is what objectiveness consists in. (shrink)

This paper will offer a systematic reconstruction of al-Ġazālī’s Sceptical Argument in his celebrated Deliverer/Delivered from Going Astray (al-Munqiḏ/al-Munqaḏ min al-Ḍalāl). Based on textual evidence, I will argue that the concept of certainty (yaqīn) in play in this argument is that of the philosophers—most notably Ibn Sīnā—and that it is firmly tied to demonstration (burhān) and hence to the materials of syllogism (mawwād al-qiyās). This will show that contrary to what many scholars believe, this Sceptical Argument is al-Ġazālī’s discovery of (...) a latent sceptical problem in Muslim philosophers’ epistemological theories based on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics that escaped even the agile mind of aš-šayḫ ar-raʾīs Ibn Sīnā. This reconstruction will also shed some light on the widespread assumption that al-Ġazālī anticipates Descartes’s sceptical considerations in the First Meditation. I will argue that not only do the two thinkers use incompatible strategies to reach their respective sceptical conclusions, but both their conclusions and their use of God in refuting them are also essentially non-identical. The conclusion is that the two sceptical arguments are essentially different. (shrink)

Bernard Williams argued that historical and philosophical inquiry were importantly linked in a number of ways. This introductory chapter distinguishes four different connections he identified between philosophy and history. (1) He believed that philosophy could not ignore its own history in the way that science can. (2) He thought that when engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one still had to draw on philosophy. (3) Even doing history of philosophy philosophically, i.e. primarily to produce philosophy, required a keen (...) sense of how historically distant from us past philosophers were, on his view, because the point of reading them was to confront something different from the present. (4) He held that systematic philosophy itself needed to be done historically, engaging not necessarily with its own history, but with that of the concepts it sought to understand. The chapter closes with an overview of the volume’s structure and content. (shrink)

A common and enduring early modern intuition is that materialists reduce organisms in general and human beings in particular to automata. Wasn’t a famous book of the time entitled L’Homme-Machine? In fact, the machine is employed as an analogy, and there was a specifically materialist form of embodiment, in which the body is not reduced to an inanimate machine, but is conceived as an affective, flesh-and-blood entity. We discuss how mechanist and vitalist models of organism exist in a more complementary (...) relation than hitherto imagined, with conceptions of embodiment resulting from experimental physiology. From La Mettrie to Bernard, mechanism, body and embodiment are constantly overlapping, modifying and overdetermining one another; embodiment came to be scientifically addressed under the successive figures of vie organique and then milieu intérieur, thereby overcoming the often lamented divide between scientific image and living experience. (shrink)

The third Meditation is typically understood to contain two a posteriori arguments for the existence of God. The author focuses on the second argument, where Descartes proves the existence of God partly in virtue of proving that Descartes cannot be the cause of himself. To establish this, Descartes argues that if he were the cause of himself, then he would endow himself with any conceivable perfection. The justification for this claim is that bringing about a substance is more difficult than (...) creating an attribute, so anything that can do the former can do the latter. While current explanations of this justification are either implausible or inadequate, the author argues that this principle derives support from a scholastic distinction between being-as-such and determinate being. With this distinction in view, we can make sense of Descartes's argument without appealing to ambiguous or inadequate notions. (shrink)

This essay defends two theses regarding the explanation, or ground, of modality in the early modern period. First, for philosophers in the period, essences ground a range of important modal facts. Second, as the period progresses, we witness increased skepticism about certain modal facts, due to a growing skepticism about the scope or existence of essences. These theses are supported by examination of three case studies: Descartes’ treatment of substance and mode (which forms the core of his ontology); Malebranche’s treatment (...) of causation (which bears on his defense of occasionalism); and Locke’s treatment of necessary connections among properties (which is related to his accounts of individuals and kinds). It is shown that in each case, claims about necessity and possibility take center stage, and that in each case, the status of these claims hinges on the status of claims about essences. (shrink)

Self-verifying judgments like _I exist_ seem rational, and self-defeating ones like _It will rain, but I don’t believe it will rain_ seem irrational_._ But one’s evidence might support a self-defeating judgment, and fail to support a self-verifying one. This paper explains how it can be rational to defy one’s evidence if judgment is construed as a mental performance or act, akin to inner assertion. The explanation comes at significant cost, however. Instead of causing or constituting beliefs, judgments turn out to (...) be mere epiphenomena, and self-verification and self-defeat lack the broader philosophical import often claimed for them. (shrink)

Descartes was the first to hold that, when we perceive, the representation need not resemble what it represents but should correspond to it. Descartes developed this ground-breaking, influential conception in his work on analytic geometry and then transferred it to his theory of perception. I trace the development of the idea in Descartes’ early mathematical works; his articulation of it in Rules for the Direction of the Mind; his first suggestions there to apply this kind of representation-by-correspondence in the scientific (...) inquiry of colours; and, finally, the transfer of the idea to the theory of perception in The World. (shrink)

The attention paid in the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana to the major exponents of seventeenth-century philosophical rationalism, from its foundation by Giovanni Gentile in 1920 until 1979, reveals important changes that provide us with interesting information on Italian Neo-idealism. The small number of articles on Descartes can be interpreted as the result of an overall approach – sanctioned by Gentile – different from that of Hegel, who considered Descartes as the founder of modern philosophy. For Gentile, Descartes represents a (...) stage in the history of philosophy spanning from Humanism to Spinoza, and, in a more particular Italian perspective, from Campanella to Vico. This interpretative scheme persisted also under the direction of Ugo Spirito, when Cartesianism continued to receive little theoretical and historical attention, with the exception of Eugenio Garin’s contributions. In the years from 1945 to 1979, the Giornale critico emphasized instead the interest for Spinoza, a very important author for Gentile, up to the double monographic issue published on the occasion of the third centenary of Spinoza’s death (1977). In turn, the lack of interest for Leibniz was constant and evident from the small number of articles published from 1920 to 1979, which were furthermore not particularly connected with the international, coeval Leibniz scholarship. (shrink)

In arguing against the likelihood of consciousness in non-human animals, Descartes advances a slippery slope argument that if thought were attributed to any one animal, it would have to be attributed to all, which is absurd. This paper examines the foundations of Thomas Willis’ comparative neuroanatomy against the background of Descartes’ slippery slope argument against animal consciousness. Inspired by Gassendi’s ideas about the corporeal soul, Thomas Willis distinguished between neural circuitry responsible for reflex behaviour and that responsible for cognitively or (...) consciously mediated behaviour. This afforded Willis a non-arbitrary basis for distinguishing between animals with thought and consciousness and those without, a methodology which retains currency for neuroscience today. (shrink)

In his Christian and Metaphysical Meditations (1683) Malebranche develops a reflection in which the self discovers in its interiority that the interlocutor able to answer some of its questions is the divine Word. Through references to the Holy Scriptures and to Augustine, Malebranche constructs a meditative itinerary that differs from the one proposed by Descartes, as it moves from the lumière naturelle in the Cartesian sense to the lumière of the Word. In the light of these historical-theoretical data, we propose (...) a reconstruction of the role played by interiority and meditation in certain texts by Malebranche, highlighting the moments in which he appropriated the Cartesian heritage and those in which he distanced himself from Descartes’ philosophical paradigm. (shrink)

Descartes held that it is impossible to make true statements about what we perceive, but I go over alleged cases of illusory experience to show why such a skeptical conclusion (and recourse to God) is overblown. The overreaction, I contend, stems from an insufficient awareness of the habitual expectations brought to any given experience. These expectations manifest themselves in motor terms, as perception constantly prompts and updates an embodied posture of readiness for what might come next. Such habitual anticipations work (...) best when they efface themselves, so it is easy to blame perception when our expectations get frustrated. I illustrate this misdirected blame with the example of a stick partially in water: it is only because we expect the stick to be straight that its appearance as bent is deemed problematic. I thus conclude that, if we factor in the habitual interpretations operative in perception and switch to a processual view that allows practical engagement, we can deflate the worries that led Descartes to rule out perceptual truths. Distancing myself from the naïve “sign” of folk semiotics, my critique draws inspiration from the triadic semiotic model developed in some late medieval schools of Portugal. (shrink)

En este texto se ofrece una interpretación de la crítica de la Modernidad de Bolívar Echeverría a partir de la noción de subsunción de la imaginación a la razón, y de un reflexión sobre la locura. Para dar significado a la noción mencionada se ofrece un breve estudio del uso del concepto de imaginación en Descartes y Kant. Para ofrecer la reflexión sobre la locura se recurre a las ideas de Foucault, Derrida y Echeverría sobre el asunto. Finalmente, se presenta (...) a la imaginación no subsumida a la razón y a la locura como elementos de crítica y resistencia a la modernidad capitalista, en el marco del planteamiento de Echeverría. (shrink)

I discuss Descartes’ metaphysics of selfhood, and relevant parts of contemporary philosophy regarding the first person. My two main concerns are the controversy that surrounds Descartes’ conception of conscientia, mistranslated as ‘consciousness’, and his conception of selfhood and its essential connection to conscientia. ‘I’-thoughts give rise to the most challenging philosophical questions. An answer to the questions concerning the peculiarities of the first person, self-identification and self-ascription, is to be found in Descartes’ notion of conscientia. His conception of selfhood insightfully (...) informs his conception of personhood. I offer a unified account of selfhood, conscientia, the first person, and personhood anchored in the self’s authority of reason and autonomy of freedom. (shrink)

This introductory article outlines how this special issue contributes to existing scholarship that calls for a rethinking and re-evaluation of common assumptions about early modern philosophy. One way of challenging existing narratives is by questioning what role systems or systematicity play during this period. Another way of rethinking early modern philosophy is by considering assumptions about the role of philosophy itself and how philosophy can effect change in those who form philosophical beliefs or engage in philosophical argumentation. A further way (...) of advancing early modern scholarship is by examining the tight links between early modern views on metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and moral, social, and political philosophy, on the other hand. Moreover, there are ongoing debates whether and how the traditional distinction between rationalism and empiricism, which has been questioned for several reasons, should be replaced. It has been proposed to replace it with a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy, but this distinction cannot easily accommodate early modern debates concerning moral, social, and political philosophy. In addition to highlighting several ways how early modern philosophy has and can be rethought, we summarize how the papers in this special issue contribute to these ongoing efforts. (shrink)

Pierre-Sylvain Régis’s Cartesianism is quite singular in seventeenth-century French philosophy. Though, can we speak of a form of experimental science in Régis’s work? After exploring his notions of ‘system’ and ‘hypothesis’, I will define his position in relation to Claude Perrault, Jacques Rohault, and the Royal Society. I argue, first, that the contrasts which traverse French science are not so much about the use of experiments but about whether or not observational data can be traced back to hypotheses and to (...) a coherent system. Secondly, that we can detect a significant similarity between Boyle’s positions and the views expressed by Perrault and also by Régis. Lastly, that French science, even in its Cartesian version, is much more probabilistic than English experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This contribution aims to present the different philosophical interpretations of Descartes and Cartesian philosophies in the 17th century within the Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Studies on Descartes and Cartesian philosophies profoundly influenced the scientific orientations of the Revue by promoting the encounter between historical-philosophical and epistemological research. By reconstructing a century of Cartesian interpretations in the Revue, from the 1930s to the present day, the contribution examines the link between the universality of philosophical ideas and the analysis of texts, between (...) the history of ideas and the history of philosophical systems. (shrink)

This paper takes a fresh look at Johannes Clauberg’s Logica vetus et nova, in order to try to clarify its nature and character. Differently from prior readings of Clauberg that analyze his philosophy from the point of view of the construction of ‘ontology’, the approach of the present paper sees in Clauberg’s philosophy a late-Humanist work, accentuating his pedagogic and hermeneutical interests. Indeed, in Clauberg’s philosophy, hermeneutics and pedagogy are intrinsically bound together. This, the paper suggests, is supported not only (...) by the concrete subject-matters of his logic, but also by the examination of Clauberg’s milieu and of his sources. Analysis, in this framework, has a strictly hermeneutical usage. (shrink)

That Descartes’ God is not a deceiver is amongst the canonical claims of early modern philosophy. The significance of this (purported) fact to the coherence of Descartes’ system is likewise canonical, infused in how we teach and think about the _Meditations_. Though prevalent, both ends of this narrative are suspect. We argue that Descartes’ color eliminativism, when coupled with his analysis of the cognitive structure of our sensory systems, entails that God is a deceiver. It’s doubtful that Descartes recognized this, (...) given his insistence that God is not a deceiver, and the role this plays in his system. But this is a concession Descartes can grant if we are careful about the kind of deception at play—a kind Descartes _does_ recognize, albeit not without some ambiguity. On our story, Descartes’ metaphysics and epistemology are not driven by concerns about deception _per se_, but by concerns about God’s _benevolence_. (shrink)

This paper examines how Descartes’ philosophy was presented and discussed in articles and reviews published in Mind from 1900 to 1947, a period in which this most prestigious British philosophical journal was edited by George F. Stout (until 1920) and then by George E. Moore (from 1921 to 1947). The survey deals with various aspects of the reception of Cartesian philosophy in the journal: articles devoted to several topics of Cartesian thought, critical notices and reviews of the secondary literature, discussions (...) of twentieth-century English translations of Cartesian works. In line with the theoretical character of Mind, most of the interpreters discussed Cartesian philosophy with the aim either of checking its internal consistency or of proving how the Cartesian system might be rendered consistent with its own premises. In this respect, all the themes revolving around the problem of the Cartesian circle attracted the attention of commentators, and the intuitionist foundation of Cartesian theory was analyzed. Descartes’ metaphysics and natural philosophy were often evaluated from the perspective of contemporary philosophical debates, while their original historical context was neglected. Of particular relevance were issues like the mind-body problem, discussed at the beginning of the century in relation to developments in psychology, and the question of the existence of the external world, which was examined from various standpoints, metaphysically, epistemologically and from the point of view of linguistic analysis. Interest in Descartes was shown by many authors from major philosophers (such as Ward, Schiller, Taylor, Broad, Ryle) to lesser known scholars whose profiles and contributions are outlined. Through the angle of the Cartesian presence a sketch emerges of the rich and variegated philosophical scene of British culture in the first half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

By pushing Descartes to more clearly explain the union of body and soul beyond the functioning of a ‘strong’ passion, namely sadness, Elisabeth wants Descartes to review his idea of the passions, and his understanding of the ‘theory of the four humors’. This chapter aims at showing that Descartes turns away from Galen’s theory of the humors, which he globally adopts in the 1633 Treatise of Man. With the shift in his conceptualization of the humors between this Treatise and the (...) Treatise of the Passions (1649), Descartes analyzed more specifically the inner feelings, consciousness, and the passions, by considering that a man is not simply a body, but a psychophysical being, with a body and a soul. (shrink)

Methodologically rigorous description, analysis, and critique of postmodern phenomena presuppose a rigorous theory of postmodernity, for which the philosophy of Martin Heidegger holds great untapped promise. This essay explicates the basic content of Heidegger’s “metametaphysics,” since for Heidegger a “metaphysics” is the epochally prevailing projection of the meaning of being in general, and he offers a theory of Western metaphysics. I begin with Heidegger’s analysis of the “regional ontologies” of the sciences in his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time, since (...) the metametaphysical works of the “late middle” Heidegger in the 1930s–1940s extend this analytical framework to metaphysics as global ontology. I then explicate Heidegger’s views on modern metaphysics, focusing on his analyses of modern science and the philosophy of Descartes, before turning to his theory of postmodernity, which I extract from his analyses of modern technology and the philosophy of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Consciousness is connected with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation of whatever appears. Existence, by contrast, is used to express the fact that something is given in experience, is present, or is real. Usually, the two notions are taken to be somehow related. This chapter suggests that existence is at best introduced as a metaphysical (or meta-experiential) concept that inevitably escapes the domain of conscious experience. In order to illustrate this claim, two case studies (...) are considered. The first case is provided by Descartes’s famous treatment of consciousness and existence in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The second case is meant to contrast the Cartesian approach by taking the opposite route, as delineated by Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) in his ‘fundamental ontology’. (shrink)

In the history of European philosophy and science, René Descartes is considered an author of a methodology of radical doubt, meditation, and the conception that explains the cause of human errors. But the course on internalization, knowledge of one's own Self, methodology of searching foundation of knowledge and conception of perfect reason have been formed already in the times of a Late Antiquity, particular by Augustine in his works “Soliloquies” and “Confession”, Boethius’s “The Consolation of Philosophy” and was continued in (...) the New age by Loyola’s “Spiritual exercises” and Teresa of Avila’s “The Interior Castle”. Therefore, Descartes could be rightfully considered rather the brilliant inheritor of this tradition than pioneer. To this chain of philosophers and theologians who were forerunners of Descartes’s theory of Radical doubt and especially problem of the source of human errors worth to add a new name – Hadewijch, the representative of medieval Dutch vernacular theology and her works “Visions” along with “Letters”. Precisely her point of view on cause of human errors, very close to the explanation have been given by Descartes in his IV Meditation. The aim of the research is to demonstrate common positions of Descartes’s and Hadewijch’s explanation of the nature of the errors. (shrink)

The study pursues, in a historical as well as in a systematic-analytical way, the reading of Descartes' philosophy as a project of a fundamental critique of theology and transcendence. Besides the exclusion of everything 'theological' from the field of rational discourse and its relegation to the field of fideism, this also involves the reinterpretation of the concept of 'God' as Descartes uses it, in a sense that is to be purified of transcendental, but especially of theistic implications.

In this article, I provide a historical and bibliographical exploration of the handwritten, dictated commentaries (dictata) of Johannes de Raey (1620/1622–1702) on the texts of René Descartes (1596–1650), shedding light on their structure, development, and on their relations with the academic commentaries of Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Christoph Wittich (1625–1687). The study of these commentaries, which are extant as class notes, is important because they conveyed one of the first systematic teachings of Descartes’s ideas and constituted a vehicle for their (...) further dissemination across northern Europe. (shrink)

In this chapter I provide a reconstruction of the contents of the lectures provided by Burchard de Volder by means of experiments at Leiden, in the years 1676–1678, as well as of the natural-philosophical interpretation he provided of the experimental evidences he gained. Such lectures, mostly based on the experiments described by Boyle, served De Volder to teach natural-philosophical ideas which he borrowed from Descartes, and which he re-interpreted in the light of Archimedes’s hydrostatics.

In this article I discuss a particular aspect of the Dutch reception of the ideas of René Descartes, namely the use of his Traité de l’homme by Henricus Regius. I analyze the use that Regius made of the theory of the movement of muscles, passions, hunger, and more generally of the neurophysiology expounded by Descartes in his book (not printed until 1662–1664). In my analysis, I reconstruct the internal evolution of Regius’s neurophysiology, I illustrate its sources beyond Descartes (i.e., Jean (...) Fernel and Santorio Santorio), and I show that he was certainly acquainted with some of its contents as early as 1641 (when he used it with the mediation of Descartes), before relying on it—as variously discussed in secondary literature—in his Fundamenta physices (1646), when he appropriated from it without Descartes’s authorization. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss the contents of the now lost academic dictata of Henricus Regius, embodying one of the first comprehensive teachings of natural philosophy inspired by René Descartes at a university. These contents are partially extant in Martin Schoock’s Admiranda methodus (1643), and can be reconstructed from Regius’s early texts and correspondence with Descartes. They reveal that Regius was original with respect to Descartes especially in his account of magnetism, which was functional to his medical physiology, and discussion (...) of the powers of plants, out of which he developed such a physiology. (shrink)

This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a constant, lively dialogue with other thinkers, both in its internal evolution as well as in its reception, re-use, and assumption as a starting point in addressing past and present philosophical problems. In doing so, it focuses on a feature that is crucially emerging in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science, namely the complexity in the (...) production of knowledge. The book explores the applicability of this approach to a long-considered armchair philosopher, namely René Descartes, who is now more and more understood as a full-blown scientist, networker, and intellectual éminence grise rather than as the mere philosopher of the cogito, as well as the originator of different ‘Cartesianisms’ which encompassed many ideas and approaches for long captured by dichotomic historiographical categories as rationalism and empiricism, or speculative and experimental philosophy. The essays gathered in the volume aim to address the ways in which Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, early modern thinkers who developed upon his ideas and on particular topics as Nicolas Malebranche or Thomas Willis, those who adapted his overall methodology in developing new systems of knowledge as Johannes Clauberg and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, and contemporary thinkers from continental and analytic traditions like Emanuele Severino and Peter Strawson. (shrink)

Borges’ The Circular Ruins tells the story of a magician who turns out to be a character in a dream. Leibowitz (2021) argues that this scenario undermines the rational indubitability of Descartes’ Cogito. The magician, he argues, is an unreal appearance and therefore does not exist. I argue that Borges drew a distinction between reality and existence and that he was right to do so. There are various senses of reality and the sense in which a dreamt character is unreal (...) poses no threat to their existence or to the indubitability of the Cogito. The magician is unreal because he is a mind-dependent, illusory and fake. Nonetheless, he can be certain that he thinks, therefore he is. (shrink)