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From: cash@convex.com (Peter Cash)
Newsgroups: news.groups,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: SCI.PHILOSOPHY.OBJECTIVISM
Message-ID: <5058@convex.convex.com>
Date: 1 Feb 90 16:08:06 GMT
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In article <0ZltB5y00Xc1MZPXZ9@andrew.cmu.edu> cr10+@andrew.cmu.edu (Christopher John Rapier) writes:
>About the Skepticism vs Realism debate I mentioned earlier I suggest
>read Rene Descartes "Meditations on the First Philosophy". Great work
>that attempts to provide a base for reality without presuposing the
>existance of reality. Excellent philosophizing. 

>basically he starts by saying that if he is pondering the nature of his
>own existance then he must exist to be able to do that. All things are
>taken from there. 

Yes, but does he really go anywhere?  The doubts that he raises in the
First Meditation are very powerful; I doubt whether he ever really settles
them.  Remember, there are three kinds of doubt in the 1st Meditation:

1.  Doubts about the veracity of the senses ("My senses have sometimes
deceived me", so maybe they're *never* reliable)

2.  The dream argument (Maybe I'm dreaming right now; maybe my whole life
is a dream)

3.  The Evil Genius (who can deceive Descartes about everything, even the
principles of mathematics and geometry).

Against these doubts, Descartes pits two insights:

a.  If I doubt my own existence, then I must exist.

b.  God exists, is good, and wouldn't fool around with me (i.e. allow me to
be mistaken about really important stuff, like that the world exists, etc.)

Lots of commentators have remarked on the weaknesses in Descartes'
arguments, and I'm really not saying anything new when I tell you that
Descartes doesn't rescue us from the skepticism into which he deliberately
plungs us in the 1st M. 

For example, "a" doesn't prove that Descartes exists.  Maybe it proves that
*something* exists, or is muttering to itself, but not that the "I" exists.
After all, Descartes could be wrong about so many things.  Maybe he's a
troglodyte that lives at the bottom of a well and dreams about being a man.
Maybe he's some wraith that's come into existence for a moment, "dreams" up
a life history, says to itself, "I doubt, therefore I am", and then pops
out of existence again.  Maybe words ("exist", "I", "doubt", "am", etc.)
don't mean what Descartes thinks they do.  (The Evil Genius is very
powerful, remember!)

Certainly, the Evil Genius could mislead Descartes about the nature of God,
so "b" doesn't follow.  

The best tack to take is to re-examine the doubts that get Descartes
started.  The best analysis of these that I have ever seen is in Bourdain's
commentary on the Meditations in _Objections and Replies_.  (Yes, the
article that the editor considers to be "utterly without merit" and that is
placed last in the book.)  I think that G.E.M. Anscombe edited a version of
_Objections and Replies_; your library should have a copy.


--
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             |      Die Welt ist alles, was Zerfall ist.     |
Peter Cash   |       (apologies to Ludwig Wittgenstein)      |    cash@convex
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