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Science, Certainty, and Descartes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Gary Hatfield
Gary Hatfield*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

It is difficult to determine the place of experience in Descartes’ philosophy and science. His a priori, rationalist metaphysics would seem, on the face of it, difficult to reconcile with the explicit appeal he makes to sensory evidence in both his scientific practice and methodological remarks. Although earlier descriptions of Descartes as a pure a priorist in natural science (e.g., Koyré 1978, pp. 89-94) have rightly been rejected, it would be a mistake to embrace the other extreme, as does Clarke (1982), with his bold revisionist thesis that Descartes was, in actuality, an empiricist. And yet the possibility of combining the rationalist and empiricist elements in Descartes’ thought has also seemed problematic, for it has been assumed that Descartes required that experientially based knowledge meet the standard of absolute certainty set by the the method of doubt in the First Meditation (Garber 1978).

Type
Part VIII. Descartes
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 249 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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