Descartes Against the Skeptics (review)

228 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY agent); and in still other cases, one might question the choice of particular English equivalents (e.g., "procedures" for progressi, "tactics" for modo di procedere)--an inescapable problem afficting any translation. The interesting philosophical question here is whether there is an unchangingintelligibleMachiavellianessence definable apart from, yet also governing the various editions and translations of his works; or whether each edition, rather than having a separable being with its own independent meaning, is instead the whole of Machiavelli viewed from a certain place. Is Machiavelli's teaching something that exists through the particular editions and translations, but always moving beyond any one of them; does it change through their sequence? This is not the occasion for exploring these questions, even if they do hover about each new edition. But at least the imperative does emerge that any true study of Machiavelli requires a knowledge of Italian; and, failing that, recourse must be had to a good translation. Atkinson's edition thus provides an excellent introduction and serves a real need. JOHN n. GEERKEN Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School E. M. Curley. Descartes Against the Skeptics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. Pp. xx + 242. The perennial fascination of Descartes is his failure. Cartesianism exerts enormous influence in Western philosophy, but as E. M. Curley says in Descartes Against the Skeptics, Cartesiansim "fails as a system" (p. 170). Curley says that this is because the arguments for the existence of God on which the system depends are no good. Other commentators blame Descartes's fanciful physics, his unintelligibletheory of ideas, his unbridgeable dualism, and so on. And how could the genius of Modern Philosophy commit the circle? Was he a secret atheist? How could he search for certainty when all about him new scientists based progress on probability? Perhaps Descartes was really a skeptic, for after all, his demon hypothesis is the greatest advance in skepticism since Pyrrho. Perhaps his metaphysics is a reductio. And why did the discoverer of analytic geometry eschew mathematical physics? The whole man is an unstable engima; his separate parts are pillars of stone. Descartes had careful readers from the beginning. Arnauld, Gassendi, Hobbes, Mersenne; and recently, Alqui6, Beck, Frankfurt, Gueroult, Kenny, Popkin, Kemp Smith, Wilson. Curley's greatest historical debt is to Popkin, who sets the skeptical milieu; his greatest critical debts are to Alqui6, Frankfurt, and Gueroult, who stimulate him to develop alternative explanations. Curley's own reading of Descartes is fresh, his commentary lucid, and his interpretations reasonable. He apologizes unnecessarily for yet another book on the Meditations. Curley stresses that Descartes is to be understood in historical context, arguing convincinglyfor the immaturity of the Regulae in relation to the Discours. And he shows how Descartes implants his physics in the Meditations, presenting the circle, proofs for the existence of God, and mind and body with an eye on physics that provides a new perspective on the Meditations. I find difficulty in going along with Curley only on one issue. In his discussion of the cogito and the circle, Curley argues that a valid or reasonable ground for doubt must compel assent in the sense that to doubt p, one must pose a q that provides specific grounds (which need not be very probable) for doubting what is claimed in p. That is, Curley says of Pyrrho's statement "To every argument an equal argument is opposed" that "when someone who holds that is confronted with a compelling argument leading to the conclusion that all our clear and distinct ideas are true, he is bound, I think, to produce an equally compelling counterargument and not merely to claim that it may be possible to produce such an argument" (p. 117). "The skeptic does not want to be, and does not think he is, patently arbitrary" (p. 118). In other words, Curley claims that for q to BOOK REVIEWS 229 provide valid ground for doubting p, q must confront p directly in content. Thus he wants to exclude the standard skeptical gambit of providing as ground for doubt a secondary-level r to the effect that both logic and experience suggest that for doubting p, it is possible that there is...