Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Daniel Garber

Critical Essay by Daniel Garber

SOURCE: "Science and Certainty in Descartes," in Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by Michael Hooker, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. 114–51.

In the following essay, Garber traces Descartes' approach to science and scientific practice from the Regulae to the Principia Philosopiae, contending that Descartes abandoned his early philosophy that science must be deductively certain, instead nearly coming to the conclusion that science relies on hypothetical arguments and experimentation.

Descartes's principal project was to build a science of nature about which he could have absolute certainty. From his earliest writings he argues that unless we have absolute certainty about every element of science at every level, we have no genuine science at all. But while the very general sketches Descartes gave for his project were clear, the details of just how he was to build such a science and precisely what it was to look like when he...
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