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Since the days of antiquity the refutation of scepticism is a highly estimated occupation of philosophers, but it was not till Descartes that it was regarded as a condition of any justified claim to knowlege. Whoever did not attempt to refute the sceptic and succeed in doing so could not be certain to be in a position to reject his doubts and was, therefore, for Descartes a concealed sceptic.¹ The refutation of scepticism became the best way ("optima via") of reaching knowledge which meets philosophical standards² and, in this way, scepticism itself changed radically: it didn't stand any more for a way of life free of all dogmatic claims to knowledge, but it was a philosophical standpoint taken for tactical reasons. It was not the end, but a means of philosophical reasoning. The doubt of Descartes is a 'staged", methodological doubt. There are other modifications of the sceptical doubt and the strategies to reject it connected with this change in the role of the sceptic.³ I don't pay attention to them because one can make sense of the idea "no knowledge without refutation of scepticism" without Descartes' distinction between the mental and the physical and without claiming any epistemological priority of the mental. It is this idea which makes his "First Meditation" so attractive and which seems reasonably plausible, as Stroud has shown rather recently.⁴

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3691-6_16

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