Doubt, knowledge, and what happens when we “why” ourselves into chaos
I have been teaching René Descartes this week in my Core Texts class, and I’ve noticed something about him that I don’t think gets discussed nearly enough. Descartes is usually introduced as the great doubter. He is the man who decides to question everything. The senses might deceive us. Our teachers might be wrong. Our inherited ideas might be unreliable. Perhaps even the world around us is not quite what we think it is. Eventually we arrive at the famous cogito…I think, therefore I am. From there, the story often becomes fairly predictable. Descartes becomes one of the fathers of modern skepticism, perhaps even the patron saint of the autonomous individual who refuses to accept anything on authority. But reading the Discourse on Method again with my students, I am not sure that is quite fair to him.