Really? Why do you think so?

(I think it’s possible to say Descartes was working on a problem that doesn’t look like a problem now without being condescending, just like if he had got hold of a bad text of Plato, and what I was interested in was valid interpretations of Plato, I would just say that, there is no reason for me to waste my time being overly charitable when he really just did do badly the thing I am looking to him for. I have a slightly bigger problem with Russell, actually. “The table is not brown”? Because it’s really variegated black, tan, and brown? Because atoms have no color? Because color is only in the human mind? Because photons and light waves have no color? Because, here, is the problem: photons and light waves are in fact distinguishable in a way that maps pretty directly to color. So what is the point? I end up with two points: Physics shows that things aren’t what they seem; and quantification permits us to distinguish qualities that we’d thought of as subjective in a truly scientific way. And given Russell’s interest in mathematizing everything, I might guess this is really the point, but then you would seem to have run together Cartesian rationalism with Baconian empiricism, and this seems to be a problem, if only because one now confronts the fact that modern philosophy is disdainful of empiricism in general and especially of measurement in particular.

Even with the additional point that you have to do the scientific explorations and then figure out how everything works in the mind before you can say you know, one is stuck here.)

That’s an awesome thought, but the kid beat me to the proper response. As to ends and beginnings, why can’t Kant be both?

Well, by “Renaissance” I actually meant the European 16th century. But the Reformation, the wars of religion, the discovery of America and sea routes to Asia, the rise and consolidation of absolutist monarchical states, etc. all “didn’t happen”? Look, I already said that any categories of periodization are performative/retrospective, and I’ll add vague, with indeterminate spacio-temporal boundaries and much “internal” diversity, stratification and conflict. But if the extreme nominalist critique of such periodization categories is extended to the limit, then one ends up with nothing but “stuff happens”: i.e. no idea or ideas of history and the transformations of social and cultural patterns and structures that form the focal interest of the very notion of “history”. And that amounts to a self-stultifying denialism, in which nothing of interest can be said, or, perhaps, more and more can be said endlessly, but basically amounting to nothing more than ever more elaborate ways of re-inventing the wheel.

Though I’m unequivocally in the historicizing camp here, it might be worth reviewing why Descartes gets pegged in legend as the “founding father” of Modern Philosophy, (though he perhaps should more properly be pair with his mirror opposite Bacon, with their complementary faults of formalist deductivism and ad hoc empiricism). And that has to do with the declaration of an entirely new beginning in philosophy, in which “reason” is to be assigned the ambitious task of a secular mastery of the world. And that new beginning involved the elevation of an autonomously self-grounding “reason”, which was to take the form of a “presuppositionless science”, (which gesture/criterion/end was to be repeated later in different configurations by, e.g. Hegel and Husserl). That’s why I would emphasize the inaugurating move of an hyperbolic doubt, whose excessiveness contrasts with the rather odd and meager “physics”, (and which excessiveness any number of successors would attempt to damp down). It amounts to a nihilating, erasing gesture toward the philosophical past: ah, the metaphysics of presence! But what’s more, it installs the epistemological notion of the “subject”, though IIRC Descartes never used that word, at the basis of philosophical inquiry and investigation of consciousness and its ways of knowing, (as opposed to, say, the embeddedness of knowledge in worldly structures), were to pre-occupy the main lines of philosophical investigation in the modern era, until the linguistic turn of the mid-20th century. And needless to say, the concomitant mechanical movement in 17th century natural philosophy was to eventuate in the successful synthesis and establishment of the complex and apparatus of empirical-analytic nomological natural science and its progressive extention, upon which much modern pridefulness hangs, though one should be wary of any excessively teleological view of that eventuality.

Now, it’s not as if this legend of modern philosophy is exactly and simply true or false, no more than modern philosophy itself is. And there’s no need to postulate some overaching unity and teleology to the matter, Hegel-style, rather than noting the successive consequentiality of different emerging configurations and their transformations. But it’s worth wondering, (because that’s basically just what philosophy does), at where this rather odd move of hyperbolic doubt, seemingly so fraught with consequences, came from and just what it was reacting to.

Yes, the allusion was almost certainly Descartes’s point, and what makes it almost certainly the point is that it’s in the Discourse on Method. In Part One of the Discourse he discusses his education. The saying is found in Part Two of the Discourse in a sentence in which he refers briefly back to what he learned in his college days. The Discourse is remarkable for the extraordinary skill with which Descartes simultaneously works to rub his readers’ faces in how educated he is (sometimes blatantly and sometimes subtly) and to argue that the education of the day is of extremely limited value without the method. This is one more way in which Descartes shows his well-educated cleverness while simultaneously insisting that it does no good if people don’t listen to him.

On Descartes and substantial forms:

It seems to be a matter of some dispute whether Descartes intends to reject substantial forms outright or merely to eliminate them from physics as useless; in other words, whether his argument is ultimately that there are no substantial forms (argued by, say, Rozemond), or that the only substantial form we can know about is the mind (argued by, say, Skirry). There are reasons for thinking the former; but there are places where Descartes sometimes seems committed to the latter (and he explicitly says it in, for instance, the open letter to Voetius). Of course, Descartes has a habit of using scholastic terms but adjusting them here and there to suit himself, so that might be the problem.

In any case, Descartes’s attack on substantial forms seems primarily to be related to his attempt to remove final causes from physics (cf. the Sixth Replies, in which he associates rejection of substantial forms for bodies with precisely the claim that they require treating bodies as if they had minds capable of knowing ends). His argument against accidental forms is equally that they are otiose: the only reason for positing them is to explain sensation, but we can explain sensation without them. And actually I suspect that the toast confusion is best seen as relevant to the Cartesian rejection of accidental forms: it’s the accidental forms of the bread, not the substantial form, that are ‘hoovered out’ on the (Cartesian view of the) Aristotelian view, when they can instead be explained by microphysical properties.

That is, it’s traditional to teach Kant, at the end of the module, in the way I’m saying Descartes really ought to be taught at the beginning of it: as new, but as confusingly and confusedly entangled with what came before. I actually don’t have any major problems with this way Kant is traditionally taught, as a final book-end to this particular shelf of books.