The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Friday, June 14, 2019

The argumentative philosopher

In the Meditations, Descartes offers a multitude of arguments employing surprising premises to reach remarkable conclusions, epistemological or ontological.

Like everybody else who is generally not persuaded, nearly all of his arguments strike me as unsound, some egregiously so, and some involving equivocations at least some of which cannot have been genuinely inadvertent.

But the ideas are fascinating and the arguments absorbing, and never does the author attempt to bully us by appeals to authority: his own, that of science, that of the best minds, or of what "we, today" of course know.

Reading the French version with the objections and replies, GF 328, Paris, 1979.

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