Descartes - Bernard Williams & Bryan Magee (1987)

when the term modern philosophy is used in universities it's usually to make a distinction from ancient and medieval philosophy so it doesn't mean just the philosophy of our own day here in the 20th century it means the philosophy of the last four centuries in fact there's one man who is generally and i think rightly regarded as the inaugurator of modern philosophy the frenchman descartes so in practice what the term modern philosophy means is philosophy from descartes onwards renee descartes was born in france in 1596 he received an unusually good education but he also had unusual independence of mind and while still young he perceived that the various authorities he was studying quite often put forward arguments that were invalid as a young man he became a soldier and traveled widely in europe though without seeing any fighting and he was struck by the fact that the world of practical life was as full of contradictions as the world of books he became fascinated by the question whether there was any way at all in which we human beings could get to know anything for certain and if so how he stopped traveling and went into seclusion in holland the country in which intellectual life in those days was at its freest and there during the 20 years from 1629 to 1649 he produced work of the profoundest originality in mathematics and philosophy and also did a great deal of work in science he invented the branch of mathematics known as coordinate geometry it was his idea to measure the position of a point by its distance from two fixed lines so every time we look at a graph we're looking at something invented by descartes in fact those two familiar lines on a graph are known by his name they're called cartesian coordinates cartesian being the adjective from the name descartes his most famous works of philosophy are the discourse on the method which was published in 1637 and the meditations published in 1642 he never married though he had an illegitimate daughter who died at the age of five he always had an eye to his own dress was proud of being an officer and on the whole preferred the company of men of affairs to that of scholars but during the years of his creative work he lived a very solitary life when he was 54 he was prevailed on by queen christina of sweden rather against his will to go to stockholm and become her tutor in philosophy it was a mistake in the bitter swedish winter he succumbed to pneumonia and he died in the following year 1650. with me to discuss the work of this first of modern philosophers is the provost of king's college cambridge bernard williams author of a well-known book on descartes bernard williams i think the best way we can begin is to try and get clear in our minds what it was that descartes thought was the main problem he was going to have to confront when he started now what was that i think he'd been impressed by the education you referred to and his experience of the life around him with the idea that there was no certain way of acquiring knowledge it looked as if there were some sorts of knowledge around but there was no reliable method by which people could advance knowledge i think it's very important that to put it in a historical context that one realizes that science in our sense really didn't exist i mean the concept of science in our sense as an organized international enterprise with research methods and laboratories and all that simply didn't exist and there was room for an enormous range of opinions about what chances there might be of ever being on a science of the being a science i mean on the one hand there were people and perfectly sensible people who thought that if you just found the right fundamental method you could solve all the fundamental problems of understanding nature in a very short while for instance francis bacon the english statesman thought that that you'd be able to get everything on the right road in a very brief period on the other hand there were people skeptical people who thought you couldn't find any knowledge at all that wasn't going to be any knowledge that everything was up for grabs as it were i think one particular reason it's quite important actually why there was so much skepticism around was actually a result of the religious reformation that after the religious reformation there are all sorts of claims made about how you found out religious truth and they all conflicted with one another and there was no way of deciding between them and that gave rise to a tremendous amount of controversy in which people said and enemies of all religions said well there simply isn't a way of solving any of these questions all these people disagree with each other you can't put it on a foundation and then religious people sort of reacting against that in turn said well religion's no different than this from anything else there isn't a way of putting anything on a firm foundation so that skepticism was quite an important current in the intellectual climate of descartes time coexisting in an odd way with very extravagant hopes of what science might be able to do and for instance might be able to do for mankind through what we would now call technology for instance there were great hopes that there could be a scientific medicine on the scientific industry and so on but nobody quite knew how to do it for a fundamental innovator like descartes the institutional setup must have presented problems too mustn't it i mean almost every serious institution of learning or study or teaching was in the hands of an authoritarian church whose own intellectual leaders were for the most part enthrall to ancient authorities that is that is certainly true of course there were many different religious uh influences as um as we just said i mean that one effect of the reformation had been that some seats of learning had more of a protestant complex complexion while obviously those in descartes in paris had a catholic uh complexion and so on but of course the point you mentioned about authority is very important although there had been a good deal of research into what we would now call mechanics or kind of mathematical physics in the middle ages and we shouldn't forget that fact a great deal of what was would go by the way of being science was actually in the form of commentary on ancient books above although not exclusively those of aristotle and one thing that descartes and others of his generation absolutely knew was that historical authority was not the same thing as it were first order research or inquiry so in other words what one can say is that descartes in starting out on his famous search for certain knowledge was really looking for a way of moving forward from the situation that you've just outlined i mean he was looking for a research program as we might say in modern parlance and prior to that a research method yes i think that that's that's perfectly correct description situation it's very important as one further fact which conditions all of his work and which one finds the thread through it was that science was not conceived as a shared or joint or organized enterprise as it is now for us it's just taken for granted that science means scientists there are a lot of people and they communicate with each other and there's a division of labor it's a division of intellectual labor at that time in the first half of the 17th century it was still a reasonable project for one man to have the idea that he could lay the foundations of all future science and descartes who did really fundamentally believe that it was not as it were a piece of megalomaniac insanity on his part as it would be in the modern world for anybody to have that idea now in my introduction to this discussion i said that descartes became fascinated by the question of whether there was anything that we could know for certain he was clear from the outset wasn't he that certainty and truth are not the same thing and that the i mean to put it at its uttermost crudity uh certainty is a state of mind truth is relates to the way things are out there in your world but he seems to have thought that uh you could only be know that you've got the truth so to speak if you also had grounds for certainty so that his method was not only going to have to be one which delivered the goods in the form of worthwhile conclusions but also gave him a way of defending them against skeptical arguments so now how did he go about meeting that double barrel requirement well descartes had a set of conditions on inquiry um and some of them were just sort of sensible rules about dividing questions up into handleable amounts trying to get your ideas clear and things like that but it had got this very characteristic and important rule for him that you shouldn't accept as true anything about which you could entertain the slightest doubt now of course as you said on the face of it that isn't an immediately sensible rule because in ordinary life we're constantly seeking true beliefs about things but we don't necessarily want to make those beliefs as certain as possible one thing we'd have to invest too much effort into making the ultimate you know ultimately certain beliefs all the time but descartes who was trying to get at the foundations of science and also not only the foundations of a science itself in the sense of fundamental general truths about the world but also to lay the foundations of inquiry that is to be able as he thought to lay the foundations of the possibility of going on to find out more things to establish that scientific knowledge was actually possible for him he felt that it was absolutely essential that you should start the search for truth with a search for certainty that what he wanted to do was to be able to put the scientific enterprise as we would put it into a shape in which it could no longer be attacked by skeptics so the first thing he wanted to do was to engage in a kind we might call it preemptive skepticism in order to put the foundations of knowledge beyond skeptical reach he said to himself i will do everything the skeptics can do only better and what i can do by pressing the skeptical inquiry hard enough is he hoped come out the other side with something which would be absolutely foundational and rock hard and one of the most characteristic features of descartes is not that he confuses the idea of looking for truth and the idea of looking for certainty he saw they were two separate separate things but he thought that the only sure way of searching for truth was by starting by searching for certainty and that led him didn't it to the famous cartesian doubt yes as a method not not the discourse on the method that's not that's about something else but but doubt used as a method was fundamental to his procedure he adopted something that he called the method of doubt and indeed the method of doubt is part of the method which is discussed in the discourse on the method but only one element in it that's that's a situation there now the method of doubt worked but since he was looking for certainty by laying aside anything in which he could find a doubt as he famously put at one point it's like having a barrel of apples and some of them are bad and some of them are sound you want to keep on the sound ones so you take them all out first look at them one by one throw away the ones that are dubious and put back only the absolutely sound ones so he started by emptying his mind of all beliefs laying aside anything in which he could see the slightest doubt and the way he did that was really in three stages he started by laying aside things which just an ordinary common sensical grounds you might possibly find doubtful for instance he reminded himself of such well-known facts as sticks can look bent in water or you know things can look curious colors to you if you have defects of eyesight and certainly obvious things but he wanted to go beyond those absolutely so every day kinds of doubt or grounds of doubt the next step he did was to entertain the idea that perhaps we could doubt that we were really awake and seeing things around us as we ordinarily suppose for instance he just entertained the following thought he had often dreamt that in the past that he was perceiving things while he was dreaming at the time he was dreaming he thought just as he does now that he was seeing people or tables or whatever around him but of course he woke up and found that was all an illusion how could he be certain that at this very instant he wasn't dreaming well that's an unnerving kind of skeptical consideration it had been used by skeptics before but he gave it an orderly and settled place in his inquiry now of course the dream doubt the doubt based on the dream does depend upon knowing something it depends upon knowing that in the past you've sometimes woken up and found you and dreaming i mean it depends on the idea you know something about the world for instance that sometimes you sleep sometimes you wake sometimes your dreams on he then took another step he said i will imagine i will go to the most extreme doubt possible i will imagine the idea of a malign spirit sort of evil spirit a malicious demon as it sometimes golden literature whose sole intent is to deceive me as much as he can and then i put myself the following question suppose there were such a spirit is there anything he couldn't mislead me about and this is of course is a pure thought experiment it's an abstract thought experiment we must emphasize that descartes never meant this philosophical doubt to be a tool for everyday living he makes that point over and over again the the the method of doubt and particular the fantasy or model of the evil spirit is used only as a form of intellectual critique in order to winnow out his beliefs and see whether some are more certain than others and of course the ultimate uh uh purpose for his long-range strategy of winnowing away everything that he can possibly in any imaginable circumstances doubt is to find rock hard indubitable propositions which can then function as the premises for arguments well as two things i mean he wants to find he certainly wants to find rock hard indubitable propositions let's say the propositions which in some sense which of course requires a bit of inquiry to what exactly is cannot be doubted which in some sense cannot be doubted which will resist the doubt um he wants them in part as premises of arguments he also wants them in some rather more general role as to provide a kind of background which will validate the methods of inquiry i was referring to before and we perhaps can say something about how that works yes but now after peeling away all imaginably doubtable propositions what are the utterly indubitable ones that he finally arrived well the famous thing that he arrived at that what the some french commentators call the turning point of the doubt that's where the doubt has got to the end it does a u-turn and he starts coming back again constructing knowledge again the point at which it stopped was the reflection that he was himself engaged in thinking as he said the malicious demon can deceive me as he will he can never deceive me in this respect namely to make me believe that i am thinking when i am not because if i have a false thought well that's a thought so in order to have a deceived thought i've got to have a thought so it must be true that i'm thinking and from that descartes uh drew another conclusion or at least he immediately associated with that another fundamental truth namely that he existed and so his fundamental first proposition or two propositions really was i am thinking therefore i exist or cogito ego sum in the latin formulation or as it's often called the cogito that's that it's worth making the point that he himself uh made it clear that by thinking he didn't just mean conceptual thought he meant all forms of conscious awareness absolutely right experience feelings etcetera etcetera cogito in this latin formulation equally for descartes french formulations means all sorts of things like perceptions and pains and so on not just uh so it wouldn't be unfair to say that what he was saying was i am consciously aware therefore i know that i must exist that's it he does actually in the great work called the meditations in which this is most carefully and elaborately set out he does actually show a great deal of finesse in pushing the boundaries of the cogito forward step by step through various kinds of mental experience but the some of what he gets to is exactly that yes now in the process of peeling away everything that can possibly be doubted in order to arrive at these fundamental indubitable propositions he himself has shown that from these fundamental propositions nothing follows that although i am consciously aware i may draw all sorts of false inferences about for example the external world or whatever it might be from whatever the deliverances of my own consciousness are so i'm conscious only i mean i can be sure only of the fact that i am having whatever immediate experience it is i am having i can't be absolutely certain of any inference i may make from that well it depends what sort of inference it is uh what he thought was that the mere fact that i have the experience as it were have been confronted with this table for instance doesn't guarantee the existence of that table i mean that was got rid of even at the dream state of the duct and of course it's even more got rid of by our friend the malicious demon who is maybe i might just have this experience and nothing actually be there so i can't immediately infer from my experience what descartes tries to do is to construct now a set of considerations which will enable him to put the world back though it has to be it has to be said straight away that the the form in which the world is put back is rather different from that of common sense we don't just as it were having moved all the furniture out of the attic and because of the dad stuff it all back again in a totally unreconstructed form we have a different view of the world when we reconstitute it than we did in our everyday common sense experience and incidentally we'll come to how he does that but it's a very important fact about the method of doubt that that is so it's extremely important because sometimes sometimes people talk about descartes doubt as if all he did he had a kind of gratuitous doubt and then sort of put the whole world back again afterwards but it's very important that not only does he put it back for very special reasons but that what he puts back has actually been subtly modified by an intellectual critique of how we can know things yeah but now how he puts it back i was going to say the point that i'm concerned to get at now is that he seems in arriving at his indubitable propositions to have painted himself into a corner because he's given himself indubitable propositions which he himself has shown at a previous stage of the inquiry can't be used to infer any certain truths about the existence of anything outside myself well he all he's seen at the earlier stage of the proceedings is that the most obvious way of inferring the world from them isn't valid he's now going to give you a way which he claims is now of course some people think that this actually is a bit of a conjuring trick and that he actually tries to get himself out of the corner to which he's painted by the well-known hero of the thriller novel you know likely he threw off his bonds but i mean this is how it works he now having as you rightly say got to the point of which he is only the contents of his consciousness which he is acquainted with there's nothing else available to him it's obvious he's going to put the world back he's got to do it entirely out of the contents of his consciousness so he's got to find something in the contents of his consciousness which leads outside himself and he claims that what this is is the idea of god he discovers among the contents of his consciousness the conception of god and he argues that this is unique among all the ideas that he has among all the things that are in his mind this alone is such that the mere fact that he has this idea proves that there is really something corresponding to it that is say there really is a god that's a very difficult one for many modern reasons of course in fact he has two different arguments both of which he uses in the meditations for doing this one is an old medieval argument called the ontological argument which is uh i think pets we need to spend time on that is that is a kind of logical puzzle i think a metaphysical puzzle but it's it's much less characteristic of descartes the one that's really characteristic of descartes is the argument which says i have this idea in my mind but i see an absolutely intuitive necessary principle which is the lesser cannot give rise to the greater the less i cannot be the cause of the greater now my idea of god is the idea of an infinite thing and although it's only an idea in itself it's nevertheless the idea of an infinite thing it involves the idea that i can conceive an infinite being but no finite creatures i know myself to be could possibly have given rise to such an idea the idea of an infinite being it could only have been implanted in me by god himself as he memorably puts it at one point as the mark of the maker on his work god as it were signed me by leaving in this infinite idea of god himself when i reflect thought the lesser cannot give rise to the greater in this way i realize that since i have this idea of god it can only be because there actually is a god who has created me so he's then put in the position of founding our knowledge of the external world upon a belief in the self-evidentness of the existence that's right it's absolutely central the the arg the next bit then goes that it it works like this he then says i the things i know about this god i know that he exists i know that he's omnipotent i know that he created me and i know that he is benevolent these are of course all traditional christian beliefs and because god created me and is benevolent he is concerned as much with my intellectual welfare as with my moral welfare and what that means is that if i do my bit and that's very important and i clarify my ideas as much as i should and i don't ascend precipitately to things i haven't thought out properly if i do my bit in that sense then god will validate the things which i am then very strongly disposed to believe now i find that however much criticism i make of my ideas however carefully i think out what is involved in my beliefs about the physical world and all that kind of thing although i can suspend judgment in the doubt i wouldn't have got to this point if i couldn't although i can suspend judgment in this doubt i do have a very strong tendency to believe that there is a material world there and since i have this disposition i've done everything in my power to make sure that my beliefs are not founded on error then god will at the end as it were make sure that i am not fundamentally and systematically mistaken that is there is such a world so you know by ending up arguing in effect that the world of science is given to us by a god whose existence is self-evident and whose benevolence is self-evident he's so to speak not so much answered the skeptics about science has jumped over them and he's bypassed well what he says is that he it's absolutely essential to his position that he believes that these arguments that involve god will be ascended to by any person of good faith who concentrates on them enough that's absolutely essential he he cannot accept it it would ruin his whole position if you accepted the idea that whether you believe in god is a matter of cultural psychological upbringing and perfectly sensible people can disagree about whether the god or not however hard they think about it it is essential to descartes that to deny the existence of god confronted with these arguments is as perverse and as totally and bad faith as it would be to deny the tries to is for and therefore the idea is that if you lead the skeptic properly through it and the skeptic is an honest man and is not just mouthing words or trying to impress and you put these proofs before him he must at the end ascent now people have not done this because they haven't thought hard enough they haven't split it into they haven't done it in an orderly manner a lot of the skeptics are in fact fakes who simply go around making a rhetorical position don't really think about it but if you're in good faith and think hard enough about it then you will come to see this truth and then you cannot consistently deny the existence of the external world that's what he believed now one very important outcome which this set of arguments had was uh that of positing a world which consists fundamentally of two different sorts of entity there's the external world which is as it were given to me by a god on whom i can rely but there's me who is observing this external world and he made a great point again in this earlier stage of the argument when he's stripping away all the propositions that he can possibly doubt of saying that when he's considering himself and the nature of his self he can even imagine himself existing without her but he can't imagine himself uh not having the the thinking awareness yeah that's the point about the i am thinking being indubitable right that's right so one consequence of that is that you get a world positive which consists on the one hand of thinking entities which are locationless and substanceless and a world a material world which this thinking entity is thinking about or observing and it's a world of observer and observed mind and matter spirit and material which has become built into the whole western way of looking at that absolutely but now descartes ultimate aim from the beginning has been to establish the project of science or of what we would call science that's it the project of what we would call science and by the arguments that you've outlined he's now arrived at a certain view of the external world now how is this external world to be treated scientifically now that you remember i mentioned earlier that when god we through the help of god we put the world back again we didn't put back quite the same well that we've thrown away that it's criticized in the process and in our reflections we come to the collusion not only is an external world the external world just as my essence as a thinking thing is simply thought the external world has an essence too and that's simply extension it simply takes up space that it's susceptible to being treated by geometry and the mathematical sciences all it's as it were colorful aspects i mean the fact that it's colored that there are certain tastes and sound these are really subjective they're on the mental side they're subjective things that occur in consciousness which are caused by this physical extended geometrical world he had an example which i think it's worth mentioning it's a very good one about a piece of wax he said if you take a piece of wax it has a certain size and shape in your hand a certain color smell texture feel temperature and so on and it seems to us to be the combination of those properties if you put the same piece of wax in front of a fire it immediately melts and then all those things change different color different smell different temperature different everything and yet we want to say it's the same wax now what about it what is there about it that's the same answer i suppose that there's a continuous history of space occupancy yes there is as you know there is a great uh one of the disputed things in uh expanding descartes is what exactly he thought the wax argument proved and how much he thought it proved just by itself but he certainly did use that example to illustrate if not actually to prove uh what he thought was the fundamental idea that is it was space occupancy just being a piece of space yes and it's rather important but curious he did actually not think he really did think a piece of space he didn't think he was just a thing in space because he didn't believe in a vacuum he really did think that the whole world was one extended item and that separate item things in it as we say tables or whatever really are local pieces of this in certain states of motion now this is a foundation for the mathematical physics of the 17th century in its own terms didn't come off i mean eventually it was going to be replaced by the classical physics and dynamics of newton which had a different conception of a mathematical world but it did a tremendous amount to establish the notion of a physical world which is fundamentally of a mathematical character and permits mathematical physics to be done because one of the most important and striking facts about the scientific revolution starting in the period we're discussing in descartes lifetime and through his work is that the the first of the great sciences as it were to get going was in fact mathematical physics chemistry as well the things that deal with sorts of things in that much more that kind of detail is of course much more product of the 18th and 19th century not of the 17th century but wouldn't it be fair to say that descartes in his time did more to launch the possibility of science and to as it were cell science to the educated public than anyone else yes i should have thought that was probably true i mean the figure who was all also enormously favored famous and who's as a matter of fact whose actual physics is nearer to classical physics as it came out in the end is actually galileo rather than descartes but of course galileo was more notorious perhaps than respectable because he was tried and condemned by the inquisition and so on uh yes i mean descartes intellectual influence in this respect was simply enormous even though the details of his physics were eventually to be in good part reputation now up to this point in the argument what descartes has shown descartes hasn't as it were provided us with any physics what he's shown is that a mathematically based physics is possible and is applicable to the real world yes can you expand on that distinction a little bit yes absolutely he what he hopes to have shown by the maneuvers we've been through we've followed so far is that as it were the world is so constructed that man is capable of knowing about it i mean in that sense man and the world are made for each other by god there is still a teleological thing at the end in god even though of course man in his essence is not actually part of nature because man is this immaterial intellectual substance which isn't part of the natural thing man is not part of nature in that sense but he uses it where his intellection is quite well adjusted to it and that means we can conduct a mathematical physics above all now descartes thought that some of the fundamental principles of physics could themselves be known by what we would call philosophical reflection he thought in particular we could know by such reflection that every physics had to have a conservation law there had to be something that was conserved we talk about the conservation of energy the conservation of force and so on uh descartes destructibility of matter as it used to be of course now we know the equivalence of matter and energy so through atomic reactions and so on now descartes actually picked on the quantity it was conserved something which wasn't what was conserved and indeed in terms of classical physics later is not even well defined but the idea was there and that was a pri all right was to be known by reflection further details of the laws of physics he thought required investigation and in particular how the world was actually laid out how different patterns of motion were to be founded he thought was a matter for experimental inquiry now this is quite important because people descartes is rightly said to be a rationalist philosopher that is that he thinks that fundamental properties of the world and of the mind and so on can be discovered by reflection by a kind of philosophical reflection and he does not think that everything is just derived from experience or experimental thing it's sometimes supposed that he was such a strong rationalist that he thought that the whole of science was to be deduced by purely kind of mathematical or logical reasoning from metaphysics that if i sat and thought hard enough about the cogito and god and matter and all that i'd arrived without the whole of science he thought no such thing in fact he's absolutely consistent always in saying that experiments are necessary to distinguish it in some ways of explaining nature and others you can build different models this is very modern very modern aspect we thought you can build as or construct different intellectual models of the world within his laws experiment is needed to discover which are truly there yes and is experiment seen by him as designed to test the answers or to give us the material for the premises to our argument it's designed for a number of different things actually but really the following that if you take the fundamental laws of nature the principles on which matter moves there are a lot of different mechanisms you could imagine which would produce superficially the same effect you then make differential experiments you then arrange a setup in which one thing will happen if one model is what's really there and it won't if another is and so you select between models and that's really is a quite a good description of quite a lot of what physicists doing well it's the modern notion of the crucial order and he was very keen on that one of the things that descartes was admirable about was that it was simply no good blundering around the world trying out his better to see what you could find out you had to ask the right question and that's again this thing we were saying father god is on your side if you do your bit god will not allow you to be systematically deceived if you don't systematically deceive yourself so what you've got to do is to think of the right questions to ask and then god will assist nature in giving you the answer i think it's worth making the point at this stage in the discussion that although god is an absolutely indispensable element to descartes in the course of arriving at his method once you've got the method you don't have to be any sort of believer in god to use it no do that that is an exceedingly important point the descartes wanted to free the process of science from theological constraints or foundation or as one might say free it from theological foundations and hints from theological interference but of course he was extremely keen to say this does not mean that we've produced a godless world we've produced a world which is in fact made by god and where our knowledge of it is guaranteed by god but where you have to appeal by god to god in your intellectual life is not in as you rightly say in conducting science but in proving to skeptics that it can be conducted and descartes very sensibly thought you shouldn't spend a lot of time in proving to skeptics that it can be conducted but need to do it once he thought he'd done it now let's all get on with it now one uh phrase that's commonly used for an aspect of this whole system that he provided us with is cartesian dualism we've talked about this already i mean the mind body yes the the the division of total reality into spirit and matter yes now didn't this give him a theoretical problem of a very important kind how did he explain the interaction i mean to put it very clearly how is a spirit able to push objects in the world around yes well i'm afraid frankly the answer is that he never really did i mean leiden it's somewhat scornfully said on this subject the interaction said mr descartes seems to have given up the game so far as we can see he did have a theory in a late work just before he went to sweden he wrote a book in which he did curiously try to localize the interaction between mind and body in the pineal gland which is the body at the base of the brain but of course it barely even makes sense i mean the idea that this purely sort of abstract non-material item something which is almost there not quite as it were the category of a number could induce a change in the physical world by redirecting certain animal spirits which is what he believed is so difficult to conceive even in sort of an abstract principle that it was a kind of scandal for everybody i mean a lot of the philosophy of the 17th century and indeed subsequently actually addressed itself to trying to find some more adequate representation of the relation of mind and body than descartes actually left us with nevertheless some form of cartesian dualism of distinction between observer and observed subject and object got into western thought for something like 400 years i think the distinction between subject and object nowhere and unknown it's a distinction which is simply impossible for us to do without i mean there are indeed philosophical systems that constantly try to say that we simply have no conception of the known independently of the noah we make up the whole world but of course the trouble about that is that it's very difficult well i mean complete idealism the idea that everything's there is really a product of our minds is pretty little simply quite difficult to believe and we all do and certainly all science does depend very much on a dualism between the knower and the known a world which we can know independently of our process of knowing it what i think very few people now are sent to is the absolute dualism between a completely pure mind and the body the the the noah has to be seen as indeed of course it was in philosophy earlier than descartes for instance bison thomas or by aristotle the noah has to be seen as an essentially embodied creature him or herself as it were i mean yes and not just as a kind of pure soul what would you say its main influence on western philosophy has been uh i mean descartes influence has been simply immense yes and still is well if we summarize it in one thing is it is that descartes and almost descartes alone who brought it about that the center of western philosophy for all these centuries has been the theory of knowledge the idea that philosophy starts from the question what can i know not from the question just what is the yeah or how is the world but what can i know not just what can i know but what can i know that is that it starts from a first personal eco-centric question and it is very important for the structure of descartes system i mentioned right at the beginning that it was possible in his time to think that perhaps science could even essentially be done by one person but even if you lay that historical context aside it is very important part of his enterprise that it is it is autobiographical it's no accident that his two great works are discussed on the method above all the meditations are written in the first person they are works of self philosophical self-inquiry and this first personal and epistemological aspect that as i expect concerning the theory of knowledge has been the overwhelming influence of descartes now given that that all the things are and given that the central concern of philosophy has now moved away from the problem of knowledge which was made central by descartes why is the study of descartes now as valuable to a city as it is i mean if i may put this problem in this question in a personal way you bernard williams you've spent as far as i can know almost 20 years of your life working on a book on descartes you must have thought this enormous investment of yourself and your life was worth it why um i think for two reasons i mean there are let's lay aside the purely case of historical understanding the role that descartes has played in getting us into our present situation where i think that just to know what he said in a little bit of detail is very important simply to understand who we are and where we've come from but the reason why i think that this book when i say this book above all i mean the particular book called the meditations is a book that one very much if one's interesting philosophy wants to read now is because the path it follows the path of asking what do i know what can i doubt and so on um is presented in an almost irresistible way and the point is it's not an accident that this emphasis in philosophy has been so overwhelmingly important it isn't that jay cut just because he was a dazzling stylist or something of that kind could kind of perform a long distance mesmerism on the mind of europe that isn't the reason the reason is because he discovered something which is intrinsically compelling that is the idea that i can ask myself well i have all these beliefs but how can i get round behind my beliefs to see if they're really true how can i stand back from my beliefs to see which of them are prejudices how much room for there is in skepticism these are really compelling questions and it needs an enormous amount of philosophical imagination and work to get oneself out of this very natural pattern of reflection and another very related question which comes before you very dramatically in this extraordinarily written book it's not just what can i know but as we discovered already in the cogito what am i we can imagine ourselves we have this power of imaginative extraction from our actual circumstances we can imagine ourselves looking out on the world from a different body we can imagine looking into a mirror and seeing a different face and what's important looking into a mirror seeing a different face and not being surprised and this gives us the idea a very very powerful idea that i am independent of the body and the past that i have and that is an absolutely foundational experience of the cartesian idea that i am somehow independent of all these materials cartesian dualism though once you look at it as it were sideways as a theory it's immensely difficult to believe for the reasons that we've touched on it also has about that it's almost impossible to resist if you go at it through a certain set of reflections and i think the set of reflections that descartes with unexample clarity and force lay before you to lead you down that path as i think mistaken path are so not only powerful in themselves but we're near to the bone that it is a prime philosophical task to try and arrive at an understanding of oneself one's imagination one's conception of what one might be that one would free one of that dualistic model thank you very much

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 10,670

Keywords: Philosophy, Philosophy Overdose, Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Metaphysics, Social Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Descartes, Skepticism, Bryan Magee, Bernard Williams, Cogito, Rationalism, Mind-Body, Dualism, Interview, Certainty, Foundationalism, External World, Consciousness, God, Wax Argument, Cartesian, Subjectivity, Subjectivism, Cartesian Doubt, Dream Argument, First Philosophy

Id: UEnyJrUBJmg

Length: 43min 4sec (2584 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022