A. Introduction to Part IV

Descartes, in his Meditations on First Philosophy as well in other works such as Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences attempts to provide a philosophical foundation and a philosophical method that will enable the justification of the truth of scientific claims and resist skeptical doubt. While Descartes’ cogito argument is widely endorsed as providing an indubitable truth about the existence of the thinking thing, the remainder of his philosophical argument is the subject of substantive philosophical disputation. This section of What is Philosophy? Focuses on some of the key epistemic (remember, epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature and the possibility of knowledge) arguments that followed Descartes and are characteristic of the period in philosophy we now call “early modern philosophy.” Early modern philosophy was a cosmopolitan, pan-European movement that anticipated and then came to coincide with a what we now call “the Enlightenment.” The next section of this book will investigate the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This will be followed by a section on Existentialism, a philosophical movement that can be seen as a reaction against core aspects of the Enlightenment project.

Following Descartes, the primary focus of much early modern philosophy was providing justification of the truth of scientific claims and resisting skeptical doubt. For our purposes we will date this period from the publication of Descartes Discourse on the Method in 1637 to the death of the philosopher David Hume in 1776. This dating is largely a matter of convenience. Many historians of philosophy consider the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who came after Hume and whose arguments you will learn about in the next section to be the last of the early modern philosophers. However, for our purposes, ending early modern philosophy with Hume serves to emphasize that in the philosophy of Hume the empiricist attempt to provide a foundation for philosophical knowledge in the facts of our experience comes to a cul-de-sac. As we shall see, Hume’s philosophy leads to a radical change in the goals of philosophical epistemology. This change is seen in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This section will end with Kant.

Part Four of this book is divided into four parts. It begins with an overview of some of the core philosophical positions regarding the nature of knowledge and uses this to introduce you to empiricist philosophy. Empiricism is the view that all knowledge of the world is based on our experience of the world. After this, the second part of this section is an exposition of the philosophy of the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume. Hume is notable because his empiricist philosophy leads to skepticism about our ability to demonstrate the truth of scientific knowledge. Immanuel Kant’s philosophy is an attempt to revive the possibility of providing a foundation for scientific knowledge and to rescue philosophy from the chasm of skepticism that Hume’s empiricism seems to open up. This attempt is the topic of the third part of this section. Finally, the section will conclude with a brief reflection on the implications of the traditions in philosophy that begin with Descartes and end with Hume.