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Circling to Scientia: Reading Descartes in Light of the Debate Between Stoic Dogmatists and Academic Skeptics
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 55, Number 1, January 2017
- pp. 55-81
- 10.1353/hph.2017.0002
- Article
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I argue that situating Descartes’s epistemology in relation to the debate between Stoic dogmatists and Academic skeptics sheds light on his theological argument for the reliability of clear and distinct perception in the Meditations. In particular, it allows us to understand how the argument might lead to a sort of certainty in its conclusion that is properly epistemic and not merely psychological, and it enables us to see how reasoning though the argument is supposed to make scientia possible.