The difficulty is serious, and unless we find a satisfactory solution we must admit that Descartes' thought moves in a vicious circle, or that the ideas, the building blocks of his philosophy, contain incompatible elements inasmuch as they appear both as self-sufficient and as dependent on extrinsic support. The problem of the cartesian circle, as it is customarily called, is therefore more than a special difficulty and would seem to warrant a careful re-examination in the light of recent contributions to (...) the study of Descartes' philosophy. (shrink)

The assignment of this pseudo-explanatory function in a supernatural realm, beyond the pale of any kind of verification, seems, however, of dubious value and can hardly be said to do justice to the power and subtlety of Plato's myths. For it would not raise them appreciably above the level of the whimsical products of an artist's imagination, designed to please or to relieve the mind after a strenuous intellectual exercise, rather than to uncover significant philosophic truths.