Silencing the Demon's Advocate: The Strategy of Descartes' Meditations (review)

Ronald Rubin's new book provides a refreshingly even-handed interpretation and analysis of Descartes's Meditations. Rubin skillfully employs short expositions of Latin philosophical terminology, textual analysis, and contemporary analytic method to arrive at a largely sympathetic understanding of this seminal work. But his development and employment of the heuristic device of the "Demon's Advocate" surely sets this work apart from the other, vast literature on the Meditations.

The first three chapters lay the groundwork for Rubin's study. Chapters 1–2 examine Descartes's use of the opposing terms of 'doubt' and 'certainty' and shows how this is an opposition between the vacillation and stability of belief. Rubin's point is that Descartes establishes doubt in order to achieve a stable system of beliefs. This commonplace conclusion is, however, nicely augmented by Rubin's development of the "Demon's Advocate" in chapter three. In this chapter, Rubin imagines that Descartes the author has two personae in the Meditations. The one is Descartes himself—the seeker of stability—while the other is the Demon's Advocate, who holds all of the same beliefs as Descartes but believes them to be false, because he also believes that he is being deceived by an evil demon. So, on Rubin's account, Descartes's task in the rest of the Meditations is not to establish the perfect certainty of his beliefs through positive arguments, as many commentators have supposed, but to achieve perfect certainty through the removal of the doubts cast by the evil demon scenario. Accordingly, doubt can be removed from a given proposition, and its perfect certainty established, only when Descartes convinces the Demon's Advocate of its truth.

Rubin is quite aware that this is his invention and not something Descartes contrived himself, but he demonstrates its heuristic value when coming to grips with certain aspects of the Meditations. The most thorough employment of the Demon's Advocate is in chapter 4, "The Riddle of the Cogito." Here, after criticizing several alternative interpretations, Rubin shows how Descartes is able to convince the Demon's Advocate of his (and therefore Descartes's own) existence. The fifth chapter is perhaps the most unique in that it constitutes a serious and judicious assessment of Descartes's arguments for the existence of God in the Third Meditation. This chapter is particularly refreshing in that Rubin spends a considerable amount of time coming to grips with the various pieces of the argument. This study leads to a deeper appreciation for this argument, which has largely been disparaged by critics since its publication. Here Rubin also takes on the unwelcome task of defending the argument from the charge of circularity, eventually arriving at the cautious conclusion that it may stand on its own without begging the question in any vicious way. However, the Demon's Advocate is largely absent from this analysis.

The following two chapters explicate the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas and God's veridical guarantee. Here Rubin explains, after some further critical analysis, that the demonstration of God's existence and his non-deceiving nature silences the Demon's Advocate, because the once seemingly possible hypothesis that an evil demon may be deceiving him has been shown to be, in fact, impossible. Again, Rubin carefully examines this doctrine and shows how a clear and distinct idea must be one that is in sharp intellectual focus and that has all other, non-essential ideas stripped from it. Once this is established, Rubin argues that the previous principle of affirming a belief only when the Demon's Advocate has been convinced of its truth is now, after the Fourth Meditation, replaced with the principle that he should affirm only those beliefs that can be apprehended clearly and distinctly. This latter principle is then used in the remaining chapters to examine the argumentation for mind-body distinction and union, the proof of a world of extended things, and an unusually in-depth...