Descartes' Analytic Epistemology

Dissertation, University of California, Irvine (1994)
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Abstract

In the Preface to the Meditations, Descartes advises that those who fail to grasp the proper order of his arguments will not get much benefit from them. Just as each step in a geometric proof depends on antecedent steps for its validity, Descartes holds that each rung on his ladder out of skepticism similarly depends on previous rungs. Paying particular attention to order, I resolve a number of interpretive difficulties that concern the epistemological project in the Meditations. I solve the Cartesian Circle. I show how Descartes deduces a two-condition criteria of truth, in part, from principles expounded in his Fourth Meditation theodicy; on my account, this criteria is logically prior to the famous clear and distinctness criterion as well as the Sixth Meditation claims to empirical knowledge. Finally, I show that a skeptical argument about unknown mental faculties takes center stage in Descartes' treatment of the problem of the external world--a skeptical argument that has been unnoticed in the secondary literature on the Meditations

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