Abstract

ESCARTES was born at the end of the sixteenth century, a time of enormous changes in the western intellectual world, largely brought about by the Reformation. Luther had denied the Church's authority to settle disputes on matters of faith: it was, he had insisted, the Scriptures alone which carry authority; pronouncements of the church, even those with long tradition behind them, were mere opinion, not truth. And so the question was explicitly raised and debated, how does one..