Replies

I am enormously grateful to everyone who has contributed to this double issue of Philosophical Topics, to Manuel Dries and Joseph Schear for conceiving the issue and initiating the process of inviting contributions, and to Ed Minar and Jack Lyons, former editor and current editor of the journal respectively, for their excellent work in bringing the issue into existence. Each contribution displays a level of engagement with my book¹ that would have been gratifying even if the contribution had been confined exclusively to the chapter that is its immediate focus. What I have found most gratifying, however, is the sensitivity that the contributors have shown to the broader project of the book and to the various connections and patterns that I try to trace across chapters. I thank them warmly for this.

In the preface to my book I comment on the fact that I am a philosophical generalist, and I go on to apologize to “all those whose expertise I may have propagated without acknowledgement, or mangled, or worst of all ignored” (MST, xix). That certainly includes the present contributors. I take this opportunity to repeat the apology to them, an apology whose need I feel all the more keenly having read their contributions.

1. REPLY TO CATHERINE WILSON

Catherine Wilson concludes her fascinating essay by commenting on the unprecedented and probably unrepeatable nature of Descartes’s achievement in giving us “the set of assumptions about scientific explanation that we still use for that portion of the universe that is visible or visualizable” (12). These assumptions, as Wilson’s reference to the visible or visualizable intimate, fit the style of explanation that is appropriate for the interaction of material objects. They do not fit the style of explanation that is appropriate for the operations of the self. In chapter 1 I discuss the familiar separation of the self from the material world that attends this. I describe it as “perhaps Descartes’ most significant legacy”—though I also immediately qualify this by saying that “if [it] can indeed be said to be Descartes’ most significant legacy, then it can be said to be so only malgré lui” (MST, 41). Wilson, in part III of her essay, shows, very effectively and very instructively, just how important this qualification is. She also provides additional important qualifications of her own. In fact she goes on to suggest that it is Kant, with his careful distinction between the domain of pure practical reason and the domain of the empirical sciences, who should really take the blame for the subsequent separation of the self from the material world; or at least, that Kant should take more of the blame than Descartes should. She says she both thinks and hopes that I would agree with her about this. I do. (Cf. MST, 190.)

The gap between the self and the material world is not the only gap that I take to be integral to Descartes’s vision. Another is the gap, or rather a gap, between our beliefs and reality; in particular, our metaphysical beliefs and reality. I discuss this at the end of §5 of my chapter. But it is important to be clear about what gap I have in mind.

Suppose that someone finds it irresistible to adopt the metaphysical belief that p, based on an intellectual (nonsensory) perception that p. Does it follow that p?² This is a variation on what I call the Reflective Question (MST, 31). Here, certainly, in the very posing of the question, we see a gap between our metaphysical beliefs and reality; and Wilson has interesting things to say about the means at Descartes’s disposal to close the gap, drawing on analogies with sensory perception. The core idea, if I understand her correctly, is that when someone finds it irresistible to adopt the metaphysical belief that p, based on an intellectual perception that p, and when that person is not “affected by any of the known disrupters of judgement, nor by any unknown disrupters of that general sort” (8, some emphasis added), then it does indeed follow that p. The obvious worry about this is whether there is...