From the Optics to the Meditations: The Meaning of Descartes’ Doubt
In 1604 Kepler published his Optical Part of Astronomy, dramatically changing the role of optics and the fundamental concept of vision. Instead of a window through which visual rays in-formed reason about its surrounding objects, the eye became a screen on which light painted images of no inherent cognitive value. Descartes’ life-long project of natural epistemology is an attempt to answer Kepler’s challenge to the philosophers: to explain how these meaningless stains of light, purely causal effects, can signify. In the Meditations he takes on the most devastating worry arising from Kepler’s optics and the naturalization of the senses: that we may be completely wrong concerning what happens behind the screen. In his argument, Descartes reverses the hierarchy between epistemology and philosophy of nature: it is the causal nature of sensations that created the worry, he explains, and it is this causal nature that makes it spurious; it is logically impossible that nature, “the ordered network of created things,” would causally produce systematically wrong representations of itself.
When
Thu Mar 28, 2019 4am – 5:30am Coordinated Universal Time
