by John Schwenkler
This is the second in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding.
My first post in this series explained how philosophy can aim to help us become articulate about things we already understand at a practical or intuitive level, much as drawing a map makes explicit the knowledge we have in being able to find our way around a certain place.
At the end of the post I considered several objections to this project, including that it is too conservative and uncritical to count as a philosophical endeavor. According to this objection, the project I envisioned is inadequate because of the way takes our ordinary ways of thinking for granted and isn’t concerned to replace our philosophical beliefs with better ones. At the end of this post I will explain again why I think this objection misfires, but first I want to discuss a different approach to philosophy that has an opposite orientation in these respects, and consequently takes a quite different stance on the value of “common sense.”
The opening lines to the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes’ classic philosophical text, the Meditations on First Philosophy, capture beautifully the attractiveness of this alternative philosophical project. Descartes titled his first meditation, “Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful,” and it begins as follows:
It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences.
Many people know of the famous thought experiment that Descartes develops in the subsequent pages, in which he imagines that all his thoughts and perceptions are the product of “an evil genius … [who] has employed his whole energies in deceiving me.” For Descartes, the purpose of this thought experiment was to rein in the habits of credulity that had led him in his youth to admit false things as true ones. He was instead to adopt a skeptical attitude, believing only those things whose truth he could see for himself in a “clear and distinct” way. Read more »