The Plain Truth: Descartes, Huet, and Skepticism By Thomas M. Lennon
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers 2008 | 255 Pages | ISBN: 9004171150 | PDF | 1 MB
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers 2008 | 255 Pages | ISBN: 9004171150 | PDF | 1 MB
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.
About the Author
Thomas M. Lennon (Ph.D, Ohio State University, 1968) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. Among his books are The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Philosophical Legacies of Gassendi and Descartes, 1655-1715, and Reading Bayle.
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