Knowing and knowing in Descartes

ABSTRACT

This article explores the vocabulary of knowing in Descartes’ Meditations. It offers a detailed and in part sequential examination of his use of cognitio (and the related verb cognoscere) and scientia (and the related verb scire) in the Meditations. This shows that the distinction between the two words is not simply conceptually important, as some commentators have argued, but that it is essential to his mode of operation in the Meditations. In particular, it is argued that his use of the distinction confirms a certain interpretation of his defence against the charge of circularity.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• knowledge
• cognition
• scientia
• the Circle

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The resultant translation difficulties are noted by Wright, “Kemp Smith’s Descartes,” 370.

2. Curley, “The Cogito,” 34.

3. Descartes, Second Replies, “Reasons proving the existence of God and the distinction between the soul and the body, set out in geometrical fashion,” Postulate 5, AT VII, 163–64. Henceforth I shall give only the page number for all references to the main text of the Meditations, Objections, and Replies, since they all come from volume 7 of the Adam-Tannery (AT) edition.

4. Descartes, Regulæ ad directionem ingenii, II, AT X, 362.

5. MacDonald, “Theory of Knowledge,” 162.

6. Doney, “Descartes’ Conception,” 387–90; Stoothoff, “Descartes’ Dilemma,” 306–7; Sosa, “How to Resolve the Pyrrhonian Problematic,” 236–40; Menn, Descartes and Augustine, 311–12; Sorell, Descartes Reinvented, 60–64. Some writers discuss scientia without paying particular attention to cognitio, e.g. DeRose, “Descartes, Epistemic Principles, Epistemic Circularity, and Scientia”; Della Rocca, “Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology Without God,” 9–15; Nolan and Whipple, “Self–Knowledge in Descartes and Malebranche.”

7. Sosa, “Knowledge: Animal and Reflective,” 124–30.

8. Here the French has “j’ai reconnu que j’étais, & je cherche quel je suis, moi que j’ai reconnu être” (AT IX, 21 (spelling modernized)).

9. Here in the French “je sais” corresponds to “scio,” and “animadverti” is rendered by “j’ai remarqué” (AT IX, 27).

10. See, e.g., Markie, “The Cogito and its Importance,” 143–45.

11. Kenny, Descartes, 189.

12. Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, vol. II, 963 n. 2, 1033 nn. 1–2; Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique, 162–64.

13. See e.g. Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary, 94–96 (s.v. “intuition”); Derrida, “La Mythologie blanche,” 318–20.

14. Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, xxxi–xxxii; quoted in Jolley, “Scientia and Self–Knowledge,” 16.

15. Jolley, “Scientia and Self–Knowledge,” 18–21.

16. Curley, “The Cogito,” 40; cf. Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics, 277 n. 45: “nothing at all can be known if we do not know whether there is a true God or an evil demon” (italics in original).

17. Kenny, Descartes, 184; see also Van Cleve, “Foundationalism,” 110–13.

18. Della Rocca, “Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology Without God,” 4, 11.

19. Kenny, Descartes, 172–99; Van Cleve, “Foundationalism”, 110–17. Bernard Williams’s approach follows somewhat similar lines (Descartes, 184–212; see esp. 203–7).

20. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, & Madmen, 215–23. Loeb pronounces the “memory defence” defunct, in the light of Frankfurt’s critique (“The Cartesian Circle,” 225 n. 2), as does Hatfield, Descartes and the “Meditations,” 181.

21. Kenny: “What Descartes seeks, then, is a state of mind that is in a certain sense immutable” (Descartes, 192). On immutability, see Loeb, “The Cartesian Circle,” 218–22.

22. See Gouhier’s analysis in La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes, 302–9.

23. Van Cleve, “Foundationalism,” 112 n. 31.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Moriarty

Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Peterhouse. His most recent book is Pascal: Reasoning and Belief (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has translated Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and The Passsions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings for the Oxford World’s Classics series, and is co-editor of The Cambridge History of French Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2019).