Session V: Thursday, 20th May 2021, 12:00-13:30 US Central Time (= 17:00-18:30 GMT).
Speaker: Jan Forsman (Tampere University).
Title: “Taking Skepticism Seriously: Descartes’s Meditations as a Cognitive Exercise and the Cartesian Epochē.”
Abstract: I argue for Descartes’s skepticism in the Meditations to be a meditative cognitive exercise targeted against both skepticism and Aristotelian-Scholasticism. While the anti-skeptical and anti-Scholastic readings are common in the literature, studies tend to make a choice, focusing either on Descartes’s metaphysical project and cognitive theory, reading them against Scholastic doctrine, or on skeptically driven epistemology and the method of doubt, reading them against skeptical history. I specifically draw from the historical genre of spiritual exercises, or meditations, prominent especially in the 16th and 17th century, that formed a part of the religious-cultural background of the period when Descartes wrote. Consequently, I argue that this understanding of the Meditations imposes certain requirements for our reading of the skeptical enquiry, it being a serious effort to overcome both the Aristotelian cognitive framework and the skeptical tradition, with intended metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical results. To emphasize this sincerity, I call the genuine suspension of judgment that one is expected to practice in the exercise Cartesian epochē.
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