The Plain Truth: Descartes, Huet, and Skepticism
ISBN: 9789047424468
Platform/Publisher: BRILL / BRILL
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: German literature; Science in literature.; Literature and science;

The skeptic Pierre-Daniel Huet's Censura philosophiae cartesianae (1689) is the most comprehensive, unrelenting and devastating critique of Descartes ever. It incisively captures all the issues that now interest readers of Descartes: the method of doubt, the cogito , clarity and distinctness as criteria of truth, the circularity of the Meditations , proofs of God's existence, etc. Naturally, the work provoked great controversy among the Cartesians, who were implicated in various capacities--Nicolas Malebranche as the occasional cause of the publication, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis as the chief defender of the Cartesian camp. What emerges in this study of the controversy is a heroic, defensible Descartes. He possesses hitherto unappreciated answers to the criticisms that have bedeviled his philosophy from his time to ours.


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