Comments on: Descartes’ Ambivalent Relationship with Tradition

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:12:07 +0000

This is a wonderful post. (In saying that I feel like the waiter who tells me what his “favorite” is on the menu. Doesn’t he like everything on it? All your posts are “wonderful”.) In teaching descartes earlier this semester I made this point also, with less erudition, and based more on the logic of “throwing off tradition.” How can I reject that which I do not know and in some sense have absorbed? It is like Descartes’ argument about the dream. For him to use the fact that he may be dreaming and thus mistaken entails the notion of a dream; that he and by implication his reader “knows” what a dream is. Thus, he was not doubting everything! Blessings.

By: Philarete

Philarete — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:32:01 +0000

There are also convincing studies that show how heavily Descartes’ «morale par provision» (provisional ethics) is indebted to the moral doctrine known as «probabilism», which was developpend by Dominican and Jesuit thinkers from the XVth century onward. The common ground between Descartes and his predecessors in this matter is that they all aim at reaching a «moral certainty» (a secure moral decision) in a state of speculative perplexity (doubts about how things really stands in the agent’s moral environment).

Thanks for this post!

By: Tim Enloe

Tim Enloe — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:54:20 +0000

It has interested me for the past few years how Cartesian-like assumptions about traditioin seem to infect much of Protestant discourse about “what the BIble plainly teaches.” The deep hostility of many Protestants toward the very category of “tradition” (they don’t grasp that the moment they communicate their own ideas to another person they have created a “handing down,” or a tradition) and the way they posit an absolute antithesis between the Bible and tradition looks to me like what Descartes was trying to do (but couldn’t, as you’ve shown).

By: Peter Escalante

Peter Escalante — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:58:35 +0000

Much good work has been done lately on Descartes’debt to late Scholasticism in matters of physical theory; Menn treats the connections between Augustine and Descartes in the matter of interiority and philosophic beginning; and there is always the remarkable figure of al-Ghazali, who anticipates Descartes’ method of doubt- though with a different sort of ethos, it seems.

peace
P.