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Sarah Patterson is took a BA at Oxford and a PhD at MIT. She taught at Michigan, Harvard and Tufts before coming to Birkbeck College, University of London, where she is Senior Lecturer in philosophy. She has published papers in early modern philosophy, philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, and is working on a book on Descartes's philosophy of mind.
La première Méditation n'est plus une théorie à comprendre, c'est un exercice à pratiquer.
Étienne Gilson2
1. Introduction
Descartes is well known for his employment of the method of doubt. His most famous work, the Meditations, begins by exhorting us to doubt all our opinions, including our belief in the existence of the external world. But critics have charged that this universal doubt is impossible for us to achieve because it runs counter to human nature. If this is so, Descartes must be either misguided or hypocritical in proposing it. Hume writes:
There is a species of scepticism, antecedent to all study and philosophy, which is much inculcated by Des Cartes and others, as a sovereign preservative against error and precipitate judgement. It recommends an universal doubt, not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties… The Cartesian doubt, …were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable; and no reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject (Enquiry 12.3; emphasis added).3
Hume thinks that this antecedent or methodological scepticism is simply a dead end; if we could achieve Descartes's universal doubt, we could never escape from it. But there is a more fundamental problem with Descartes's method, and that is that the doubt he recommends is so contrary to human nature that it is unattainable by any human creature. In particular, Hume regards Cartesian doubt about the existence of the corporeal world as impossible. The sceptic ‘must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body’, because ‘Nature has not left this to his choice’.4 As he famously says, ‘Nature by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel’5 and ‘Nature is...