It would be pretty to think that Descartes’ Meditations is itself a structured transformation of the meditational mode, starting with the dominance of an intellectual, ascensional mode, moving through the penitential form, and ending with the analytic-architectonic mode. Unfortunately the text does not sustain such an easy resolution to our problems. Instead, we see that different modes seem dominant at different stages; their subterranean connections and relations remain unclear.We could try to construct a nesting of mask, face, and skeleton in (...) Descartes’ use of these distinct traditions. He might have unselfconsciously inherited a Stoic skeletal structure, fleshed it with the weight of his analytic-architectonic meditation, and masked it with a penitential meditation for the sake of safety in orthodoxy. But the penitential mode provides essential structural support—it cannot be unmasked. And, as we have seen, the analytic-architectonic flesh does not always conform to the Stoic skeletal structure.The problem is that the various readings subtly undermine one another. It is as if the Meditations were composed like a Francis Bacon painting. There are plenty of good solid clues for how to read the composition of the work—in fact there are too many. The work we see when using some of those clues is quite different from the work we see when following others.Did Descartes do this deliberately? An extremely chartable reading would turn him into a new sort of Socrates, constructing puzzles to force us to examine the truth of his arguments dialectically. But whatever Descartes may be, he is not Socrates, any more than he is Hume. He is defensive as well as devious, proud as well as prickly; and he is not funny. (shrink)

In the Fifth Meditation Descartes considers the problem of knowledge preservation : the challenge of accounting for the diachronic certainty of perfect knowledge [scientia]. There are two general solutions to PKP in the literature: the regeneration solution and the infallible memory solution. While both readings pick up on features of Descartes’ considered view, I argue that they ultimately fall short. Salvaging pieces from both readings and drawing from Descartes’ virtue theory, I argue on textual and systematic grounds for a dispositionalist (...) solution. On this view, the diachronic certainty of scientia is achieved through virtuous habits of belief. (shrink)

Despite what you have heard over the years, the famous evil deceiver argument in Meditation One is not original to Descartes. Early modern meditators often struggle with deceptive demons. The author of the Meditations is merely giving a new spin to a common rhetorical device. Equally surprising is the fact that Descartes’ epistemological rendering of the demon trope is probably inspired by a Spanish nun, Teresa of Ávila, whose works have been ignored by historians of philosophy, although they were a (...) global phenomenon during Descartes’ formative years. In this paper, I first answer the obvious question as to why previous early modernists have missed something so important as the fact that Descartes’ most famous publication relies on a well-established genre and that his deceiver argument bears a striking similarity to ideas in Teresa’s final work, El Castillo Interior? I discuss the meditative tradition at the end of which Descartes’ Meditations stands, present evidence to support the claim that Descartes was familiar with Teresa’s proposals, contrast their meditative goals, and make a point-by-point comparison between the meditative steps in Teresa’s Interior Castle and those in Descartes’ Meditations which constitute their common deceiver strategy. My conclusion makes a case for a broader and more inclusive history of philosophy. (shrink)

Descartes intended to revolutionize seventeenth-century philosophy and science. But first he had to persuade his contemporaries of the truth of his ideas. Of all his publications, Meditations on First Philosophy is methodologically the most ingenuous. Its goal is to provoke readers, even recalcitrant ones, to discover the principles of “first philosophy.” The means to its goal is a reconfiguration of traditional methodological strategies. The aim of this chapter is to display the methodological strategy of the Meditations. The text’s method is (...) more subtle and more philosophically significant than has generally been appreciated. Descartes’ most famous work is best understood as a response to four somewhat separate philosophical concerns extant in the seventeenth century. Section 1 describes these. Section 2 discusses how Descartes uses and transforms them. A clearer sense of the Meditations’ methodological strategy provides a better understanding of exactly how Descartes intended to revolutionize seventeenth-century thought. (shrink)