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The second point is epistemic transparency. Descartes seems to be convinced that if
we have a belief, then our reason for that belief should be clearly available
to us, present in our minds. If I only believe something on the basis custom or authority
then it's not transparent to me why I believe. We're going to see a lot of questions
coming up about *why* someone should believe something in the sciences as
well as in philosophy or theology or anything else, on the basis of good
reasons. That's going to feed back into the idea of intellectual autonomy, that you
should have a kind of ownership or self possession of your own body of knowledge.
You should know what you believe, you should know why you believe it, and it should be
judged according to standards that you yourself find to be compelling, not
standards that you just receive off the shelf from some other person or
institution. The third point here, these points combine to create a mistrust of
tradition. This is going to feed in also to this sense that Descartes is going to reject
all philosophical reasoning prior to himself and look only inside of
himself through reflection and out in the world of common experience and common sense
to come up with something totally new. What other assumptions is Descartes
making about the nature of philosophy? What is he assuming about the nature of
method, for example? Okay so we see that this is partly a critique of
tradition. So people say we've been doing philosophy this way for a hundred years and you should be
the person who carries it in to the next generation; that doesn't look like a
project that Descartes is going to want to be part of. Instead we see he talks about
the title: THE method for correctly conducting one's reason.
What's the first thing he is assuming? There's not many methods. Some of you remember
Aristotle. Aristotle says whe you're engaged in any branch of study, you should
use the method that is best suited to the subject matter. When studying
ethics, you don't study ethics in the same way that you study mathematics.
He says this explicitly at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, which we read last year.
So we don't expect the same degree of certainty, says Aristotle, in ethics or
political science that we would expect in mathematics. We don't study history
or languages or literature in the same way we would study philosophy. We would use the
method best suited to the subject matter. Meaning, for Aristotle there are many
different methods for acquiring truth, and they have to be matched up with
the subject matter they're best suited to. Descartes talks about THE method, one single method. The
reason there's one method for Descartes is because there's just one human mind
doing the knowing. We should use the method that is best suited to the human mind, and then we apply that
to *all* subjects. We can see the difference: Aristotle says there are many subjects
out there, many objects of study, each one of them may require a different method. So we should use
diverse methods, according to what reality requires. Descartes says, wait a
minute. No matter what I'm studying, what's always there, in every study that
I do? I study history, I study mathematics, I study philosophy, I study
theology, I study literature: what's the common element? It's "I". I'm the one doing the studying,
with my human mind. And so if there is... this turn toward reflection.
I reflect upon the human mind and discover there's one method that is the...
perhaps the only method best suited to acquiring the truth in the sciences, then
that's the method I should use, regardless of the subject matter.
So the question here is whether we would agree with Aristotle and think that the method for
acquiring truth should be subject-dependent.
There's assumptions built in there about the nature of the self, or whether we
think with Descartes that the... the method acquiring truth is
independent of subject matter and depends solely upon the nature of the
human mind which is doing the knowing.