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NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 497 A REPLY BY ANTHONY KENNY I welcome the opportunity provided by Messrs. Feldman and Levison to clarify the account which I gave of the Cartesian circle. They are perfectly right in saying that Descartes can, in a roundabout way, call in question the truth of particular intuitions. Perhaps the best way to formulate the point I was trying to make is to say that, according to Descartes, simple axioms cannot be doubted in any way which involves advertence to their content. I agree that the axioms can be doubted severally under a definite description, in the sense that Descartes can say, for example, 'I doubt the first axiom which is mentioned in my Meditations'. This sort of doubt is a roundabout doubt in the sense that it cannot be a doubt based on any reason which is connected with the content of the proposition doubted. It must be based on some more general reason: for instance, the possibility that I am the creature of a deceitful god. It was for this reason that I said--misleadingly, as Feldman and Levison pointed out--that simple axioms can only be doubted generically. Descartes in fact raises only the generic doubt, but I agree that he could have raised the particular roundabout doubt--after the event. The passage which Feldman and Levison quote to show that he raised a particular doubt in fact supports rather than refutes my claim that there is never in Descartes a proposition that at a given moment he both intuits and suspects to be false. In the passage they quote he explicitly says that he judged a]terwards that it was possible to doubt simple and easy points in mathematics; and he doubts them under the generic description 'what seemed most obvious'. It must not be forgotten that Descartes thought that doubt was impossible without a reason for doubting. The only reason for doubting what seems most obvious is the second-order general reason of the possibility of creation by a deceitful god. Once Descartes has demolished this reason to his own satisfaction --by proving the existence of a truthful god--he disposes of the general doubt and of any particular roundabout doubt based only on the general doubt. Feldman and Levison are correct in thinking that on my view the goal of Descartes' speculation about God's truthfulness is to make it the case that he should never again have reason to change his mind about what he had once intuited. They say that according to this interpretation 'Descartes was not trying to discover or prove that a certain proposition is true in order to resolve his metaphysical doubt about his intuitions; he was trying to make a certain proposition true'. These are not two incompatible alternatives. By establishing the truth of a proposition 'I am the creature of a truthful god' he is at the same time trying to make it true that he will no longer have reason to doubt. I think that Feldman and Levison are correct in saying that even the proof of a veracious deity is not sufficient to establish an immutable state of certainty. It does not seem to me to follow that Descartes was not trying to do so. As he says in both the Second and the Sixth replies (HR II, pp. 39, 245) no one can have 'immutable and certain knowledge' unless he first acknowledges that he has been 498 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY created by a god who has no intention to deceive. To their objections Descartes might have replied either that the proof of God's existence was a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for immutable certainty, or he might have replied that the cases he mentioned are not cases of a man having good reason to doubt what he has once intuited, since each of them depends to some extent upon forgetfulness. I do not think that either of these answers will suffice to make Descartes' epistemology an adequate answer to sceptism. In my book I did not claim that the epistemology was adequate, but only that it was not circular. The arguments brought by Feldman and Levison do not seem...

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