Methodic doubt, in Cartesian philosophy, a way of searching for

certainty by systematically though tentatively doubting everything. First, all

statements are classified according to type and source of knowledge
e.g., knowledge from tradition, empirical knowledge, and mathematical
knowledge. Then, examples from each class are examined. If a way can be
found to doubt the truth of any statement, then all other statements of that
type are also set aside as dubitable. The doubt is methodic because it
assures systematic completeness, but also because no claim is made that
allor even that anystatements in a dubitable class are really false or
that one must or can distrust them in an ordinary sense. The method is to
set aside as conceivably false all statements and types of knowledge that
are not indubitably true. The hope is that, by eliminating all statements and
types of knowledge the truth of which can be doubted in any way, one will
find some indubitable certainties.

In the first half of the 17th century, the French Rationalist Ren
Descartes used methodic doubt to reach certain knowledge of self-
existence in the act of thinking, expressed in the indubitable
proposition cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). He found knowledge
from tradition to be dubitable because authorities disagree; empirical
knowledge dubitable because of illusions, hallucinations, and dreams; and
mathematical knowledge dubitable because people make errors in
calculating. He proposed an all-powerful, deceiving demon as a way
of invoking universal doubt. Although the demon could deceive men
regarding which sensations and ideas are truly of the world, or could give
them sensations and ideas none of which are of the true world, or could
even make them think that there is an external world when there is none,
the demon could not make men think that they exist when they do not.

Residence In The Netherlands

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 Descartes said that he went to the Netherlands to enjoy a greater liberty than
was available anywhere else and to avoid the distractions of Paris and friends so
that he could have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had inherited enough
money and property to live independently.) The Netherlands was a haven of
tolerance, where Descartes could be an original, independent thinker without fear
of being burned at the stakeas was the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (1585
1619) for proposing natural explanations of miraclesor being drafted into the
armies then prosecuting the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In France, by contrast,
religious intolerance was mounting. The Jews were expelled in 1615, and the last
Protestant stronghold, La Rochelle, was crushedwith Brulles participation
only weeks before Descartess departure. In 1624 the French Parlement passed a
decree forbidding criticism of Aristotle on pain of death. Although Mersenne and
the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (15921655) did publish attacks on Aristotle
without suffering persecution (they were, after all, Catholic priests), those judged to
be heretics continued to be burned, and laymen lacked church protection. In
addition, Descartes may have felt jeopardized by his friendship with intellectual
libertines such as Father Claude Picot (d. 1668), a bon vivant known as the Atheist
Priest, with whom he entrusted his financial affairs in France.
In 1629 Descartes went to the university at Franeker, where he stayed with a
Catholic family and wrote the first draft of his Meditations. He matriculatedat the
University of Leiden in 1630. In 1631 he visited Denmark with the physician and
alchemist tienne de Villebressieu, who invented siege engines, a portable bridge,
and a two-wheeled stretcher. The physician Henri Regius (15981679), who taught
Descartess views at the University of Utrecht in 1639, involved Descartes in a
fierce controversy with the Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius (15891676) that
continued for the rest of Descartess life. In his Letter to Voetius of 1648, Descartes
made a plea for religious tolerance and the rights of man. Claiming to write not
only for Christians but also for Turksmeaning Muslims, libertines, infidels,
deists, and atheistshe argued that, because Protestants and Catholics worship the
same God, both can hope for heaven. When the controversy became intense,

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however, Descartes sought the protection of the French ambassador and of his
friend Constantijn Huygens (15961687), secretary to the stadholder
Prince Frederick Henry (ruled 162547).
In 1635 Descartess daughter Francine was born to Helena Jans and was
baptized in the Reformed Church in Deventer. Although Francine is typically
referred to by commentators as Descartess illegitimate daughter, her baptism is
recorded in a register for legitimate births. Her death of scarlet fever at the age of
five was the greatest sorrow of Descartess life. Referring to her death, Descartes
said that he did not believe that one must refrain from tears to prove oneself a man.

The World And Discourse On Method

In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes learned
that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (15641642) had been condemned in
Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because
this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics, Descartes
suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract its
condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his
physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be taught in
Catholic schools.
Descartess Discourse on Method (1637) is one of the first important modern
philosophical works not written in Latin. Descartes said that he wrote in French so
that all who had good sense, including women, could read his work and learn to
think for themselves. He believed that everyone could tell true from false by the
natural light of reason. In three essays accompanying the Discourse, he illustrated
his method for utilizing reason in the search for truth in the sciences:
in Dioptrics he derived the law of refraction, in Meteorology he explained
the rainbow, and in Geometry he gave an exposition of his analytic geometry. He
also perfected the system invented by Franois Vite for representing known
numerical quantities with a, b, c, , unknowns with x, y, z, , and squares,

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cubes, and other powers with numerical superscripts, as in x2, x3, , which made
algebraic calculations much easier than they had been before.
In the Discourse he also provided a provisional moral code (later presented
as final) for use while seeking truth: (1) obey local customs and laws, (2) make
decisions on the best evidence and then stick to them firmly as though they were
certain, (3) change desires rather than the world, and (4) always seek truth. This
code exhibits Descartess prudential conservatism, decisiveness, stoicism, and
dedication. The Discourse and other works illustrate
Descartess conception of knowledge as being like a tree in its interconnectedness
and in the grounding provided to higher forms of knowledge by lower or more
fundamental ones. Thus, for Descartes, metaphysics corresponds to the roots of the
tree, physics to the trunk, and medicine, mechanics, and morals to the branches.

Meditations
In 1641 Descartes published the Meditations on First Philosophy, in Which
Is Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul. Written in Latin
and dedicated to the Jesuit professors at the Sorbonne in Paris, the work includes
critical responses by several eminent thinkerscollected by Mersenne from the
Jansenist philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld (161294), the English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes (15881679), and the Epicurean atomist Pierre
Gassendi (15921655)as well as Descartess replies. The second edition (1642)
includes a response by the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin (15951653), who Descartes
said was a fool. These objections and replies constitute a landmark of cooperative
discussion in philosophy and science at a time when dogmatism was the rule.
The Meditations is characterized by Descartess use of methodic doubt, a
systematic procedure of rejecting as though false all types of belief in which one
has ever been, or could ever be, deceived. His arguments derive from
the skepticism of the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus (fl. 3rd century CE) as
reflected in the work of the essayist Michel de Montaigne (153392) and the

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Catholic theologian Pierre Charron (15411603). Thus, Descartess apparent
knowledge based on authority is set aside, because even experts are sometimes
wrong. His beliefs from sensory experience are declared untrustworthy, because
such experience is sometimes misleading, as when a square tower appears round
from a distance. Even his beliefs about the objects in his immediate vicinity may be
mistaken, because, as he notes, he often has dreams about objects that do not exist,
and he has no way of knowing with certainty whether he is dreaming or awake.
Finally, his apparent knowledge of simple and general truths of reasoning that do
not depend on sense experiencesuch as 2 + 3 = 5 or a square has four
sidesis also unreliable, because God could have made him in such a way that,
for example, he goes wrong every time he counts. As a way of summarizing the
universal doubt into which he has fallen, Descartes supposes that an evil genius of
the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive
me.
Although at this stage there is seemingly no belief about which he cannot
entertain doubt, Descartes finds certainty in the intuition that, when he is thinking
even if he is being deceivedhe must exist. In the Discourse, Descartes
expresses this intuition in the dictum I think, therefore I am; but because
therefore suggests that the intuition is an argumentthough it is notin
the Meditations he says merely, I think, I am (Cogito, sum). The cogito is a
logically self-evident truth that also gives intuitively certain knowledge of a
particular things existencethat is, ones self. Nevertheless, it justifies accepting
as certain only the existence of the person who thinks it. If all one ever knew for
certain was that one exists, and if one adhered to Descartess method of doubting
all that is uncertain, then one would be reduced to solipsism, the view that nothing
exists but ones self and thoughts. To escape solipsism, Descartes argues that all
ideas that are as clear and distinct as the cogito must be true, for, if they were not,
the cogito also, as a member of the class of clear and distinct ideas, could be
doubted. Since I think, I am cannot be doubted, all clear and distinct ideas must
be true.

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 On the basis of clear and distinct innate ideas, Descartes then establishes that
each mind is a mental substance and each body a part of one material substance.
The mind or soul is immortal, because it is unextended and cannot be broken into
parts, as can extended bodies. Descartes also advances at least two proofs for the
existence of God. The final proof, presented in the Fifth Meditation, begins with the
proposition that Descartes has an innate idea of God as a perfect being. It concludes
that God necessarily exists, because, if he did not, he would not be perfect.
This ontological argument for Gods existence, introduced by the medievalEnglish
logician St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033/341109), is at the heart of
Descartess rationalism, for it establishes certain knowledge about an existing thing
solely on the basis of reasoning from innate ideas, with no help from sensory
experience. Descartes elsewhere argues that, because God is perfect, he does not
deceive human beings, and therefore, because God leads us to believe that the
material world exists, it does exist. In this way Descartes claims to establish
metaphysical foundations for the existence of his own mind, of God, and of the
material world.
The inherent circularity of Descartess reasoning was exposed by Arnauld,
whose objection has come to be known as the Cartesian Circle. According to
Descartes, Gods existence is established by the fact that Descartes has a clear and
distinct idea of God; but the truth of Descartess clear and distinct ideas are
guaranteed by the fact that God exists and is not a deceiver. Thus, in order to show
that God exists, Descartes must assume that God exists.

Physics, Physiology, And Morals

Descartess general goal was to help human beings master and possess
nature. He provided understanding of the trunk of the tree of knowledge in The
World, Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry, and he established its metaphysical
roots in the Meditations. He then spent the rest of his life working on the branches
of mechanics, medicine, and morals. Mechanics is the basis of his physiology and
medicine, which in turn is the basis of his moral psychology. Descartes believed

6
that all material bodies, including the human body, are machines that operate
by mechanical principles. In his physiological studies, he dissected animal bodies
to show how their parts move. He argued that, because animals have no souls, they
do not think or feel; thus, vivisection, which Descartes practiced, is permitted. He
also described the circulation of the blood but came to the erroneousconclusion that
heat in the heart expands the blood, causing its expulsion into the veins.
Descartess LHomme, et un trait de la formation du foetus (Man, and a Treatise
on the Formation of the Foetus) was published in 1664.
In 1644 Descartes published Principles of Philosophy, a compilation of his
physics and metaphysics. He dedicated this work to Princess Elizabeth (161879),
daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, titular queen of Bohemia, in correspondence with
whom he developed his moral philosophy. According to Descartes, a human
being is a union of mind and body, two radically dissimilar substances that interact
in the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland must be the uniting point
because it is the only nondouble organ in the brain, and double reports, as from two
eyes, must have one place to merge. He argued that each action on a persons sense
organs causes subtle matter to move through tubular nerves to the pineal gland,
causing it to vibrate distinctively. These vibrations give rise to emotions and
passions and also cause the body to act. Bodily action is thus the final outcome of a
reflex arc that begins with external stimulias, for example, when a soldier sees
the enemy, feels fear, and flees. The mind cannot change bodily reactions directly
for example, it cannot will the body to fightbut by altering mental attitudes, it
can change the pineal vibrations from those that cause fear and fleeing to those that
cause courage and fighting.
Descartes argued further that human beings can be conditioned by
experience to have specific emotional responses. Descartes himself, for example,
had been conditioned to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he had loved a
cross-eyed playmate as a child. When he remembered this fact, however, he was
able to rid himself of his passion. This insight is the basis of Descartess defense
of free will and of the minds ability to control the body. Despite such arguments, in

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his Passions of the Soul (1649), which he dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden
(reigned 164454), Descartes holds that most bodily actions are determined by
external material causes.
Descartess morality is anti-Jansenist and anti-Calvinist in that he maintains
that the grace that is necessary for salvation can be earned and that human beings
are virtuous and able to achieve salvation when they do their best to find and act
upon the truth. His optimism about the ability of human reason and will to find
truth and reach salvation contrasts starkly with the pessimism of the Jansenist
apologist and mathematician Blaise Pascal (162362), who believed that salvation
comes only as a gift of Gods grace. Descartes was correctly accused of holding the
view of Jacobus Arminius (15601609), an anti-Calvinist Dutch theologian, that
salvation depends on free will and good works rather than on grace. Descartes also
held that, unless people believe in God and immortality, they will see no reason to
be moral.
Free will, according to Descartes, is the sign of God in human nature, and
human beings can be praised or blamed according to their use of it. People are
good, he believed, only to the extent that they act freely for the good of others; such
generosity is the highest virtue. Descartes was Epicurean in his assertion that
human passions are good in themselves. He was an extreme moral optimist in his
belief that understanding of the good is automatically followed by a desire to do the
good. Moreover, because passions are willings according to Descartes, to want
something is the same as to will it. Descartes was also stoic, however, in
his admonition that, rather than change the world, human beings should control
their passions.
Although Descartes wrote no political philosophy, he approved of the
admonition of Seneca (c. 4 BCE65 CE) to acquiesce in the common order of things.
He rejected the recommendation of Niccol Machiavelli (14691527) to lie to
ones friends, because friendship is sacred and lifes greatest joy. Human beings
cannot exist alone but must be parts of social groups, such as nations and families,
and it is better to do good for the group than for oneself.

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 Descartes had been a puny child with a weak chest and was not expected to
live. He therefore watched his health carefully, becoming a virtual vegetarian. In
1639 he bragged that he had not been sick for 19 years and that he expected to live
to 100. He told Princess Elizabeth to think of life as a comedy; bad thoughts cause
bad dreams and bodily disorders. Because there is always more good than evil in
life, he said, one can always be content, no matter how bad things seem. Elizabeth,
inextricably involved in messy court and family affairs, was not consoled.
In his later years Descartes said that he had once hoped to learn to prolong
life to a century or more, but he then saw that, to achieve that goal, the work of
many generations would be required; he himself had not even learned to prevent a
fever. Thus, he said, instead of continuing to hope for long life, he had found an
easier way, namely to love life and not to fear death. It is easy, he claimed, for a
true philosopher to die tranquilly.

Final Years And Heritage

In 1644, 1647, and 1648, after 16 years in the Netherlands, Descartes
returned to France for brief visits on financial business and to oversee the
translation into French of the Principles, the Meditations, and the Objections and
Replies. (The translators were, respectively, Picot, Charles dAlbert, duke de
Luynes, and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he also met with Gassendi and Hobbes,
and he suggested to Pascal the famous experiment of taking a barometer up Mount
Puy-de-Dme to determine the influence of the weight of the air. Picot returned
with Descartes to the Netherlands for the winter of 164748. During Descartess
final stay in Paris in 1648, the French nobility revolted against the crown in a series
of wars known as the Fronde. Descartes left precipitously on August 17, 1648, only
days before the death of his old friend Mersenne.
Clerseliers brother-in-law, Hector Pierre Chanut, who was French resident
in Sweden and later ambassador, helped to procure a pension for Descartes
from Louis XIV, though it was never paid. Later, Chanut engineered an invitation
for Descartes to the court of Queen Christina, who by the close of the Thirty Years

9
War (161848) had become one of the most important and powerful monarchs in
Europe. Descartes went reluctantly, arriving early in October 1649. He may have
gone because he needed patronage; the Fronde seemed to have destroyed his
chances in Paris, and the Calvinist theologians were harassing him in the
Netherlands.
In Swedenwhere, Descartes said, in winter mens thoughts freeze like the
waterthe 22-year-old Christina perversely made the 53-year-old Descartes rise
before 5:00 AM to give her philosophy lessons, even though she knew of his habit
of lying in bed until 11 oclock in the morning. She also is said to have ordered him
to write the verses of a ballet, The Birth of Peace (1649), to celebrate her role in
the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War. The verses in fact were
not written by Descartes, though he did write the statutes for a Swedish Academy
of Arts and Sciences. While delivering these statutes to the queen at 5:00 AM on
February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and he soon developed pneumonia. He died in
Stockholm on February 11. Many pious last words have been attributed to him, but
the most trustworthy report is that of his German valet, who said that Descartes was
in a coma and died without saying anything at all.
Descartess papers came into the possession of Claude Clerselier, a pious
Catholic, who began the process of turning Descartes into a saint by cutting, adding
to, and selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work culminated in 1691 in
the massive biography by Father Adrien Baillet, who was at work on a 17-
volume Lives of the Saints. Even during Descartess lifetime there were questions
about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting
Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with
pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic
physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because all the papers,
letters, and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost. In 1667
the Roman Catholic church made its own decision by putting Descartess works on
the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: Index of Prohibited Books) on the very

10
day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Genevive-du-Mont in Paris.
During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called Descartes a Jesuit
and a papistwhich is to say an atheist. He retorted that they were intolerant,
ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, a majority of scholars, many of whom were
religious, believed that Descartess major concerns were metaphysical and
religious. By the late 20th century, however, numerous commentators had come to
believe that Descartes was a Catholic in the same way he was a Frenchman and a
royalistthat is, by birth and by convention.
Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too
much of God. He once told a German protge, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607
78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect
studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware ofthough he tried to
concealthe atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes
seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled
when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of
man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and
to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that human beings are essentially
miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things.
Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.
ADDITIONAL MEDIA

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