Descartes, El Círculo Cartesiano y La Epistemología Sin Dios

International Phenomenological Society
Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology without God

Author(s): Michael Della Rocca
Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Jan., 2005), pp. 1-33
Published by: International Phenomenological Society
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. LXX, No. 1, January 2005
Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and

Epistemology Without God
MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA
Yale University
This paper defends an interpretation of Descartes according to which he sees u

having normative (and not merely psychological) certainty of all clear and distinct ide
during the period in which they are apprehended clearly and distinctly. However, on
view, a retrospective doubt about clear and distinct ideas is possible. This interpretatio
allows Descartes to avoid the Cartesian Circle in an effective way and also shows t
Descartes is surprisingly, in some respects, an epistemological externalist. The pap
goes on to defend this interpretation against some powerful philosophical objection
Margaret Wilson and others by showing how Descartes' doctrine of the creation of
eternal truths can be brought in to support his epistemology. This doctrine and ot
analogous positions in Descartes can also reveal that Descartes, again surprising
takes important steps toward doing epistemology without direct appeal to God and Go
veracity.
You know the story. Descartes does a splendid job of setting up the skeptical
problem. His articulation of increasingly serious doubts in the First Medita-
tion is masterful and has rightly captivated generations of students. However,
so the story continues, his attempt to get out of his own skeptical doubts by
proving that God exists and is not a deceiver is completely and embarassingly
unsuccessful. The embarassment lies not just in his offering at the crucial
stage (the Third and Fourth Meditations) a particularly suspect argument or
pair of arguments for the existence of God, but also and more significantly in
his failing to appreciate the very nature of the problem he has so skillfully
raised. This failure is due to Descartes' attempt to put forth arguments about
God in order to defeat skepticism when the premises of those very arguments
are called into doubt by the skeptical arguments Descartes himself has gener-
ated. How could Descartes have failed to see that, by his own lights, he was
not entitled to these proofs concerning God? This is the blunder of the so-
called Cartesian Circle, and it is so transparent that it does not seem as if any
philosophical insight of value can lurk within it and, to some extent, redeem
it. It would have been better, so the story goes, for Descartes not to have
appealed to God, to a deus ex machina, to solve his (Descartes') philosophical
problems. It would have been better had Descartes faced the skeptical problem
DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 1
head on or at least admitted that it cannot be solved, rather than bringing God
on the stage so ineffectually. If only, so the story ends, Descartes had seen
the point that later philosophers, e.g. Hume and Kant, were to appreciate so
well: one cannot legitimately accord God any pivotal philosophical role in
one's epistemology.
In this paper, I will challenge this story. I will show that Descartes does
take important steps toward seeing how to do epistemology without God and
that, most surprisingly, he does this precisely in his response to the problem
posed by the Cartesian Circle. The divorce between God and epistemology is
not complete or, I will admit, successful, but it is present, and it reveals that
Descartes not only fully appreciates the nature of the skeptical problem he
has raised, but also grasps the insight that one cannot fruitfully bring in God
in any straightforward way to do any epistemological hard work.
To establish these points, I will lay out and defend my interpretation of
Descartes' way of handling the Cartesian Circle. Through defusing certain
important, but mistaken objections to this interpretation, we will see how
Descartes loosens the ties between God and epistemology. The crucial tool
for defusing these objections and for thus effecting the loosening is, as I will
argue, Descartes' doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths, the doctrine
whereby God somehow has power over whether or not such seemingly neces-
sary claims as "2+2=4" are true or false. This doctrine is often seen as impli-
cated in Descartes' way of generating extreme doubts. That may be so, but I
will argue that, even more significantly, it is central to the removal of the
doubt and to Descartes' steps toward epistemology without God.
I. The Standard Interpretation of Descartes9 Problem

In order to see the force of my interpretation, it is necessary to outline the
standard account of how the Circle arises. At crucial points in the Medita-
tions, particularly while considering the possibility of a deceiving God, Des-
cartes doubts all of his beliefs. These doubts extend to "matters which I think
I see utterly clearly with my mind's eye" (AT VII 36, CSM II 25), including,
it seems, all of Descartes' clear and distinct ideas.1 In order to remove this
doubt, Descartes argues that at least some of his ideas or beliefs - his clear
and distinct ideas - are true. But, so the standard objection goes, such an
argument cannot succeed. This is because the argument in question, like any
argument, starts with premises - in this case, premises that are to lead to the
conclusion that clear and distinct ideas are true. These premises all fall within
1 Generally, I will follow the translations in CSM and CSMK. Descartes says in the Third
Meditation that unless he proves that there is no deceiving God, "it seems that I can never
be quite certain about anything else" (AT VII 36, CSM II 25). Cf. the important passage
from the First Meditation, "there is not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may
not properly be raised" (AT VII 21, CSM II 14-15). Gewirth, "The Cartesian Circle
Revisited," p. 672, asserts that Descartes starts out doubting all.
2 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA
the scope of the extensive doubt that Descartes has already - i.e., prior to
embarking on this argument - announced. As such, the premises themselves
are doubtful; they are claims Descartes is not entitled to believe or to rely on.
But if he is not entitled to the premises in question then he is not entitled to
the conclusion to which they lead, i.e., the claim that clear and distinct ideas
are true. For this reason, it is often claimed, he has not succeeded in remov-
ing the doubt about clear and distinct ideas; Descartes must still worry about
whether or not he is being deceived by God even in what seems to him most
evident. Descartes' argument, on this reading, is thus inevitably ineffectual:
given the scope of the doubt, the premises cannot render him justified in
believing that his clear and distinct ideas are true, cannot enable him to know
that his clear and distinct ideas are true.
This apparently inevitable ineffectuality of the argument has seemed to

many to show that Descartes is engaged in circular reasoning. Since the
premises Descartes relies on are, as he emphasizes,2 themselves clear and dis-
tinct ideas, he may seem to be presupposing in the argument that his clear
and distinct ideas are true. But such a presupposition would, of course, beg
the question.
I must say that this criticism of circularity seems much less clear to me
than the preceding one of ineffectuality. Even if Descartes does rely on clear
and distinct ideas that he is not entitled to rely on, it does not follow that he
is presupposing that these ideas are true because they are clear and distinct.
He certainly holds that these ideas are true and he certainly holds that they are
clear and distinct, but this does not by itself show that his argument relies on
the claim that their clarity and distinctness is sufficient for their truth, nor
does it even show that the concept of clarity and distinctness figures in Des-
cartes' argument. (I will return to this point later.) If Descartes is not presup-
posing that the premises of his argument for the truth of clear and distinct
ideas are true because they are clear and distinct, then it is no longer clear
that his argument, even if ineffectual, can be called circular. In any event, we
can simply go on with the more compelling aspect of the standard picture:
Descartes' argument for the claim that clear and distinct ideas are true is inevi-
tably ineffectual given that, prior to the argument, Descartes has called all his
beliefs into doubt.
For reasons that will be important throughout this paper, it will be help-
ful to state a bit more precisely what goes wrong with Descartes' reasoning
on the standard picture. At the beginning of the Third Meditation, Descartes
expresses a doubt of each proposition. He has, at that stage a good reason for
2 See, e.g, AT VII 40, CSM II 28: "It is manifest by the natural light that there must be at
least as much in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause." This premise
is, of course, crucial to Descartes' Third Meditation proof of God's existence. The natu-
ral light is, as Principles I 30 indicates, the faculty of clear and distinct perception.
doubting any proposition. I will put this point by saying that Descartes does
not know any particular claims and, in fact, is not normatively certain of any
particular claim. At this stage, Descartes has a psychological relation to
many claims. There are many claims he considers and believes, and some of
these he may even be compelled to believe. We may say that the claims he is
compelled to believe are ones of which he is psychologically certain. But on
the standard interpretation, these are merely psychological facts about Des-
cartes. The claims that Descartes believes - including those he believes under
some sort of compulsion - are ones he has good reason to doubt. In other
words, Descartes' certainty is at this stage merely psychological and not nor-
mative. One way to get at the distinction between normative and psychologi-
cal certainty is by noting that if a claim is merely psychologically certain,
then it may well be false; but, arguably, if a claim is normatively certain - if
there is no good reason to doubt it - then it must be true. On this understand-
ing of normative certainty, normative certainty is a kind of knowledge in that
it entails truth.3 Now given the scope of the doubt, the premises that Des-
cartes relies on in his argument for the claim that clear and distinct ideas are
true are themselves doubtful. Descartes is at most psychologically certain of
these claims. Indeed, the scope of the doubt ensures that any argument one
would hope to construct for the truth of clear and distinct ideas would have
premises that fall within the scope of Descartes' radical doubt. If this is so,
then Descartes cannot mount any legitimate argument for the claim that clear
and distinct ideas are true.
This point leads to a characterization in the most general terms of the

problem with Descartes' argument concerning clear and distinct ideas on the
standard reading. That argument is illegitimate because it violates the general
claim:
(A) If Descartes is, prior to the conclusion of his theological argu-

ment in the Third and Fourth Meditations, at most merely psycho-
logically (and thus not normatively) certain of propositions in gen-
eral, then Descartes cannot by means of argument go on to acquire
normative certainty of some propositions.4
3 For similar characterizations of what I am calling "normative certainty", see Cottingham,

Descartes, p. 69, and Gewirth, "The Cartesian Circle," pp. 389, 393. Bennett flirts with,
but does not endorse this notion in "Truth and Stability in Descartes' Meditations" p. 80.
The notion of reasons or justification or knowledge involved in the notion of normative
certainty is neutral between externalist and internalist reasons, etc. We will see later,
however, that in some respects Descartes has an externalist conception of reasons. But in
articulating the conception of normative certainty, one need not presuppose either an
internalist or an externalist conception of the relevant epistemic terms.
(A) does not rule out the possibility that one who starts out with at most psychological
certainty can go on to acquire normative certainty through means other than argument.
The point is that if one starts out doubting claims in general, then no
argument can legitimately remove these doubts since any premise of that
argument would itself be doubtful. (A) gives expression to a kind of insular-
ity of the domain of claims of which one is normatively certain: one can use
argument to acquire normative certainty of some claims only if one relies on
some other claims of which one is already normatively certain. The problem
with Descartes' reasoning, on the standard interpretation, is that he fails to
appreciate this basic fact about normative certainty, i.e., he fails to see that
(A) is true.5
Many have, of course, tried to show that Descartes' reasoning in the Third
and Fourth Meditations is not as bad as it first appears. (I myself will jump
on this rather large bandwagon later in the paper.)6 There have been a bewil-
dering variety of proposed Cartesian escapes from the Cartesian Circle and
from the Cartesian blunder that I have described. Obviously, I will not go
through all the possibilities here. I don't have the stamina for that, and, I
suspect, neither do you. At this stage I would just like to point out that the
failure to appreciate the truth of (A) is the downfall of some of the most
interesting and insightful approaches to the problem of the Cartesian Circle.
Alan Gewirth, Edwin Curley, Willis Doney7 all hold that Descartes does start
out by doubting all claims, i.e., they accept the antecedent of (A). However,
these interpreters reject (A) itself or at least hold that Descartes does so.8 For
these interpreters, if one piles up the right kind of clear and distinct ideas
(claims to which one has at the outset merely a psychological relation), and,
in particular, if one comes to have the clear and distinct idea that God exists
and is not a deceiver, then one can legitimately achieve normative certainty of
at least some propositions, i.e., one can remove the doubt about at least
some claims. But without delving into further details of this strategy, we can
see that it clearly will not work. Given the initial scope of the doubt accepted
5 Bennett, "Truth and Stability," pp. 101-102, endorses (A).

Thus I will be taking back my cautiously pessimistic assessment of Descartes' epistemo-
logical project in Delia Rocca, "Mental Content and Skepticism in Descartes and Spi-
noza."
Gewirth, "The Cartesian Circle"; Curley, Descartes against the Skeptics, chapter 5;
Curley, "Certainty: Psychological, Moral, and Metaphysical"; Doney, "Descartes' s Con-
ception of Perfect Knowledge".
Thus Gewirth says, "the very nature of Descartes' s metaphysical problem requires a
passage from psychological to metaphysical certainty: requires, that is to say, that the
conclusion be more certain than its premises, not in the sense of having greater psycho-
logical certainty, but in the sense of having a metaphysical certainty which they initially
lack" ("The Cartesian Circle," p. 378). He also says, "a metaphysical certainty can
emerge from propositions whose certainty, at the point at which they occur in the demon-
stration, is only psychological," (ibid., p. 387).
by these interpreters, whatever ideas one piles up will themselves be
doubtful.9
In the light of the plausibility of the antecedent of (A) and the truth of (A)
itself, it might seem that we must admit that Descartes does not achieve
normative certainty. Some interpreters embrace the conclusion that Descartes
does not achieve normative certainty and they believe that, to some extent,
Descartes himself embraced this conclusion.10 On this interpretation, Des-
cartes was not seeking normative certainty so much as something like psy-
chological certainty or stable or unshakable, but still merely psychological,
certainty. This dark view is perennially popular, but it seems to me to be
misguided both from a philosophical and interpretive point of view. How-
ever, I will not develop here a full-scale case for rejecting this kind of inter-
pretation.11 Instead I will take up a much more promising option, one that
sees Descartes as after genuine normative certainty. This option consists in
denying the antecedent of (A), i.e., in denying that Descartes starts out with
at most psychological certainty. This option allows us to accept the truth of
(A), unlike Gewirth-style views, and to see Descartes as having and acquiring
normative certainty, unlike more psychological interpretations. Moreover,
this interpretation is, I will argue, textually well-supported and philosophi-
cally important.
II. The Case for Accepting the Antecedent of (A)

In order to begin to see all this, we need to address the fact that, as I noted at
the outset, there seems to be very good textual evidence for the antecedent of
(A). I want now to look at this textual evidence more carefully. This will be
the first stage in my argument that the rejection of the antecedent of (A), and
the approach to the problem of the Cartesian Circle consequent upon this
rejection, are textually and philosophically defensible.
Many passages suggest that the antecedent of (A) is true, that at the
beginning of the Third Meditation Descartes is at most merely psychologi-
cally (and thus not normatively) certain of propositions. As I mentioned,
Descartes writes in the Third Meditation that at that stage, since he does not
know whether or not God exists, he cannot be certain of anything. This doubt
seems to extend even to "those matters which I think I see utterly clearly
with my mind's eye" (AT VII 36, CSM II 25). Or, as Descartes puts the
9 This criticism of Gewirth and his cohort has been effectively made by Broughton
("Skepticism and the Cartesian Circle," pp. 600-604) and Van Cleve ("Foundationalism,
Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle," pp. 60-61).
Loeb, "The Cartesian Circle"; Larmore, "Descartes' Psychologistic Theory of Assent";
Bennett, "Truth and Stability". I tend to read Frankfurt this way, though this is controver-
sial and his views are hard to classify (see Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen
and "Descartes on the Consistency of Reason").
1 1 In other work, in progress, I do develop such a case.
point in the Sixth Meditation in his retrospective survey of his doubt, "I saw
nothing to rule out the possibility that my natural constitution made me
prone to error even in matters which seemed to me most true" (AT VII 77,
CSM II 53). Such passages support the view that, for Descartes, the claims
that he perceives clearly and distinctly prior to the conclusion of this theo-
logical argument are not ones of which he is then normatively certain and
indeed are at best merely psychologically certain.12
Thus there seems to be a strong textual case for the antecedent of (A).
How, then, do its proponents handle the many instances in which Descartes
appears to assert that he is certain of some claims even prior to the conclu-
sion of the proof of God's veracity? Such instances appear in the Third Medi-
tation itself. Descartes says there:
[W]hen I turn to the things themselves which I think I perceive very clearly, I am so con-
vinced by them that I spontaneously declare: let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never
bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something; or make it true at
some future time that I have never existed, since it is now true that I exist; or bring it about that
two and three added together are more or less than five, or anything of this kind in which I see
a manifest contradiction. (AT VII 36, CSM II 25)
Later in the Third Meditation, Descartes says,
Whatever is revealed to me by the natural light - for example that from the fact that I am
doubting it follows that I exist, and so on - cannot in any way be open to doubt. (AT VII 38,
CSM II 27)
Those who accept (A)'s antecedent tend to deal with such passages by saying
that these expressions of certainty are merely expressions of psychological
certainty or factual (as opposed to normative) indubitability.13 Indeed, I think
that this approach to these passages is the only plausible one for proponents
of the antecedent of (A) to adopt.
The claim that Descartes' certainty prior to his theological argument is
purely psychological receives support from his various claims that, prior to
that argument, he is compelled to assent to ideas currently clearly and dis-
tinctly perceived. Thus Descartes says in the Fifth Meditation:
12 Cf. Gewirth: "only psychological, not metaphysical certainty is possible before God's
existence is known" ("The Cartesian Circle," p. 386 ). See also Gewirth, "The Cartesian
Circle Revisited," p. 672.
13 See Gewirth, "The Cartesian Circle," p. 392. Cf. DeRose, "Descartes, Epistemic Princi-
ples, Epistemic Circularity, and Scientia"p. 235n6; Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and
Madmen, pp. 166-67; Wilson, review of Cottingham's edition of the Conversation with
Burman> p. 455.
I have already amply demonstrated that everything of which I am clearly aware is true. And
even if I had not demonstrated this, the nature of my mind is such that I cannot but assent to
these things, at least so long as I clearly perceive them. (AT VII 65, CSM II 45)
It might seem that in speaking of compulsion to assent, Descartes is assert-

ing a merely psychological fact about himself and is not asserting that, prior
to the conclusion of the theological argument, he is genuinely or normatively
certain of anything.
Thus there are two key components of the defense of the antecedent of (A),
(i.e., of the claim that prior to the theological argument Descartes is not nor-
matively certain of any claims):
(i) those passages cited above in which Descartes asserts that he

doubts at the beginning of the Third Meditation even those claims
which appear most evident to him
(ii) the interpretation of Descartes' apparent claims of certainty prior

to the conclusion of the theological argument as claims that express
merely psychological certainty and the interpretation of Descartes'
assertions of compelled assent as having merely psychological
import.
III. The Case for the Rejection of the Antecedent of (A) (Part One)
I now want to dismantle this defense of the antecedent of (A). In so doing, I
will be arguing not only that the antecedent of (A) is false and that Descartes
regards it as false, i.e., that Descartes regards himself as starting off the theo-
logical argument with more than merely psychological certainty, but also
that Descartes regards himself as being at the outset normatively certain of
each currently clearly and distinctly perceived idea.15 Afterwards, I will briefly
consider some other ways in which commentators have argued that Descartes
rejects the antecedent of (A).
I will begin by criticizing the reliance on the claim that Descartes regards
the doctrine of compelled assent as purely psychological (and not normative)
in character. I will argue that Descartes' discussion of compelled assent may
concern only normatively compelled assent, i.e., cases in which one is com-
pelled by good reasons to assent to a claim, and thus there is no good reason
14 Cf. AT IV 1 16, CSMK 233-34; AT VII 38-39, 69, CSM II 27, 48, Gewirth, "The Carte-
sian Circle," pp. 371-72.
In these sections, I will be relying primarily on passages later than (though consistent
with) the Six Meditations themselves. On this reading, therefore, Descartes in the later
works, in effect, seeks to clarify and articulate better his views on doubt and normative
certainty.
for the second element in the case for the antecedent of (A).16 A number of
passages support this interpretation.
First consider two very important passages from Descartes' Conversation
with Burman.17 In the first of these two passages, Burman raises the problem
of the Circle and Descartes responds:
[Burman] It seems there is a circle. For in the Third Meditation the author uses axioms to prove
the existence of God, even though he is not yet certain of not being deceived about these.
[Descartes] He does use such axioms in the proof, but he knows that he is not deceived with
regard to them, because he is actually paying attention to them. And for as long as he does pay
attention to them, he is certain that he is not being deceived, and he is compelled to assent to
them (AT V 148, CSMK 334).18
In the first part of his reply, Descartes says that he knows (scit) some axi-
oms. This suggests that he is in a normatively valuable epistemic position
with regard to them. In the second part of his reply, he elaborates this claim
by invoking the notion of certainty or compelled assent. Jonathan Bennett, a
proponent of the antecedent of (A) (and indeed of the view that Descartes is
not seeking normative certainty of any claim) takes this shift from talk about
knowledge to talk about certainty and compelled assent as evidence that Des-
cartes is objectionably conflating normative and psychological indubitabil-
ity.19 But this is a rather uncharitable reading. Instead, the passage can be
taken as evidence that the compelled assent or the kind of inability to doubt
that Descartes is concerned with here is, in particular, a normatively well-
grounded compelled assent or inability to doubt. Further, in this light, the
claim that he is certain that he is not deceived can be taken as the claim that
he is normatively certain that he is not deceived.

Later in the Conversation, the topic of the Circle arises again in these
remarks by Descartes:
16 Perhaps I should speak of cases in which one is compelled by good reasons qua good
reasons, i.e., in their capacity as good reasons. This qualification might be needed to rule
out cases in which I am compelled to assent to a claim by good reasons, although the
goodness of those reasons was not causally relevant to my assenting to the claim. I will
though leave out this qualification in what follows.
I will omit here all the standard qualifications about whether or not the Conversation can
be taken as a reliable guide to Descartes' thought. For a helpful discussion of this issue,
see Cottingham's introduction to his edition of the Conversation. I use these passages here
particularly because the conclusions I draw from them are supported by other more
authentically Cartesian passages, especially the passage from the Principles that I go on
to discuss.
Probat, et scit se in Us nonfalli, quoniam ad ea attendit; quamdiu autem id facit, certus est
se nonfalli; et cogitur illis assentiri.
Bennett, p. 78. Larmore in fact takes this passage as supporting a purely psychological
account of Descartes' response to the Circle (p. 70). But Larmore ignores the normative
element - scit - in this passage.
If we did not know that all truth has its origin in God, then however clear our ideas were, we
would not know [sciremus] that they were true, or that we were not mistaken - I mean, of
course, when we were not paying attention to them, and when we merely remembered that we
had clearly and distinctly perceived them. For on other occasions, when we do pay attention to
the truths themselves, even though we may not know God exists, we cannot be in any doubt
about them; otherwise, we could not prove that God exists [nam alias non possemus demon-
strare Deum esse]. (AT V 178, CSMK 353)
Descartes begins here by saying that, prior to the conclusion of the proof of
God's veracity, we cannot know (sciremus) even that our clear and distinct
ideas are true, except of course when we are attending to them. This suggests
that if we do currently clearly and distinctly perceive an idea, we do know that
idea to be true. Again, Descartes seems to be stating that he has a norma-
tively valuable apprehension of these ideas. Descartes goes on to say, how-
ever, that when we do perceive ideas clearly and distinctly, "we cannot be in
any doubt about them." He seems to have shifted from a normative claim to a
merely psychological claim about the inability to doubt. Then, in the last
clause, he shifts back to a normative locution, when he says, "otherwise we
could not prove that God exists." Such shifting between talk of knowledge
and proof, on the one hand, and talk of inability to doubt, on the other, again
suggests to Bennett (p. 78) that Descartes is guilty of an illegitimate confla-
tion of psychological and normative indubitability. But here also I think a
more charitable (and indeed plausible) reading is available: Descartes is con-
cerned not with inability to doubt in general, but with an inability to doubt
that stems from the possession of knowledge or good reasons.
Another passage that supports my contention that Descartes' concern with
compelled assent extends only to normatively compelled assent comes from
Principles I 13:
The mind, then, knowing itself [quae se ipsam novit], but still in doubt about all other things,
looks around in all directions in order to extend its knowledge further [ut cognitionem suam
ulterius extendat]. First of all, it finds within itself ideas of many things; and so long as it merely
contemplates these ideas and does not affirm or deny the existence outside itself of anything
resembling them, it cannot be mistaken [falli nonpotesi]. Next, it finds certain common notions
from which it constructs various proofs; and, for as long as it attends to them, it is completely
convinced of their truth [adquas quamdiu attendit, omnino sibi persuadet esse veras].
Descartes begins this passage with the expression of a desire to extend his
knowledge further and with a consideration of ideas with regard to which the
mind "cannot be mistaken." These claims indicate Descartes is here concerned
with some kind of normative relation to the truth. But he then goes on to
describe the extension of his knowledge as accomplished when he is com-
pletely convinced or persuaded of particular claims while attending to them.
Yet again Bennett (p. 78) takes this passage as evidence of Descartes' confla-
tion of the normative and the psychological. But, as before, this is uncharita-
ble and implausible: Descartes can instead be read as viewing the kind of con-
viction that arises from attention to clear and distinct ideas as normatively
valuable and, perhaps, as normatively certain.
All of these passages support the view that Descartes draws no sharp dis-
tinction between psychological and normative certainty and, in particular, that
Descartes takes his claims that he is compelled to assent to particular ideas as
more than mere claims about his psychology.20 These are claims about what
he knows, about normatively compelled assent; indeed, as I noted, the first of
the two Burman passages suggests in particular that the knowledge in ques-
tion here involves normative certainty. Since Descartes holds that all cur-
rently clearly and distinctly perceived ideas compel our assent, these passages
suggest that all currently clearly and distinctly perceived ideas are normatively
certain. Further, I am aware of no passages which conflict with this reading
of Descartes' claims about compelled assent. All this evidence thus counts
against the merely psychological reading of the doctrine of compelled assent,
and thus against the claim (which was to be supported in part by this psycho-
logical reading) that Descartes starts off the Third Meditation without norma-
tive certainty.21
IV. The Case for the Rejection of the Antecedent of (A) (Part Two)
In the previous section, I have weakened or eliminated the second element in
the case for the antecedent of (A). But what about the first element, that is,
how do I propose to handle those claims in which Descartes explicitly asserts
that he does at the beginning of the Third Meditation (and elsewhere) doubt
even what seems to him most evident? Don't these passages show defini-
tively that Descartes regards himself as entering the theological argument
without normative certainty of any claims?
I will answer this question in a somewhat roundabout manner by first
addressing a related question. Let's grant that I am right, that the antecedent of
(A) is false and that Descartes holds that all ideas currently clearly and dis-
tinctly perceived are normatively certain. On this interpretation, what is the
point of the argument for the veracity of God?
To answer this question, recall that Descartes allows that one can doubt a
clear and distinct idea when one is no longer attending to it. On my view,
this allowance amounts to the claim that there is good reason to doubt the no
longer clearly and distinctly perceived idea. Although at the moment of
clearly and distinctly perceiving the idea we are, on this view, normatively
certain of the truth of the idea, we can after the fact wonder whether this idea
20 Descartes' talk in the letter to Mesland of 2 May 1644 of seeing (voyant) something that
a thing is good as leading to compelled assent may also point in the same direction (AT
IV 1 15-16, CSMK 233-34).
For a different route to the claim that the certainty Descartes expresses early in the Third
Meditation is not merely psychological, see Cottingham, p. 69.
DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 1 1
that we previously clearly and distinctly perceived is true and we can wonder
whether our clear and distinct ideas generally are true. At these later times, we
are not normatively certain of the claim in question, though we were norma-
tively certain of it earlier. It is because we do not have normative certainty of
the claim after we perceive it clearly and distinctly that Descartes says that
our apprehension of this claim does not yet amount to scientia, an awareness
that is not vulnerable even to retrospective reasons for doubt. It is for the
same reason that, for Descartes, an atheist (who, qua atheist, lacks a proof
that his remembered clear and distinct ideas are true) can never achieve scien-
tia.22 Once Descartes carries out the argument for God's veracity, Descartes
has good reason to believe that his clear and distinct ideas are true and thus
Descartes can, unlike the atheist, have normative certainty of claims that he
no longer clearly and distinctly perceives. I will call normative certainty of
claims that were, but no longer are, clearly and distinctly perceived "retrospec-
tive certainty".23
We can now return to the matter of how, on my interpretation, to account
for those passages in which Descartes says that at the beginning of the Third
Meditation nothing is exempt from doubt, that even what is most evident to
him is doubtful. Don't these passages show that, contrary to the interpreta-
tion I am offering, Descartes denies that, prior to the conclusion of the theo-
logical argument, he has normative certainty? No, they do not. We are fortu-
nate to have other passages in which Descartes explicitly tells us how we are
to understand his claims early in the Third Meditation and elsewhere to the
effect that nothing is free from doubt. In the Seventh Replies, Descartes says:
I have explained, in several places, the sense in which this 'nothing' is to be understood. It is
this. So long as we attend to a truth which we perceive very clearly, we cannot doubt it. But
when, as often happens, we are not attending to any truth in this way, then even though we
remember that we have previously perceived many things clearly, nevertheless there will be
nothing which we may not justly [merito] doubt so long as we do not know [nesciamus] that
whatever we clearly perceive is true. (AT VII 460, CSM II 309.)
Here Descartes says that yes, nothing is free from doubt, but we must under-
stand this doubtfulness as, in effect, relative to certain times. Although each
claim is doubtful at some time (viz. those times which are prior to the con-
22 See especially AT VII 142, CSM II 101; AT III 65, CSMK 147.
For a similar account of Descartes' advantage over the atheist, see Van Cleve, pp. 68-69,
Cottingham, p. 72. Although Loeb endorses an interpretation according to which Des-
cartes is not seeking normative certainty but only unshakable psychological certainty,
much of his insightful account of Descartes' advantage over the atheist can be carried
over to a more normative reading. Loeb also takes up the important and difficult question
of whether the mere memory that one has carried out the proof of God's veracity suf-
fices for retrospective certainty or whether, instead, the actual carrying out of the proof
is necessary each time one wishes to attain retrospective certainty. On this issue, see AT
VIII 70, CSM II 48; AT III 65, CSMK 147.
elusion of our proof of God's veracity and which are times at which we are
not clearly and distinctly perceiving the claim in question), Descartes denies
that each claim is doubtful at all times. Claims that are currently clearly and
distinctly perceived are not doubtful at this time, though they may be doubt-
ful at other times. For Descartes, at the beginning of the Third Meditation
nothing is free from doubt just in the sense that nothing is such that it can-
not be doubted when one is not clearly and distinctly perceiving it. But this
construal of 'nothing' still allows claims to be certain even prior to the con-
clusion of the theological argument as long as they are currently clearly and
distinctly perceived.
A similar passage occurs later in the Seventh Replies:
[UJntil we know that God exists, we have reason [occasionem] to doubt everything (i.e., eve-
rything such that we do not have a clear perception of it before our minds, as I have often
explained). (AT VII 546, CSM II 373)
Here too we find Descartes restricting the meaning of his claim that every-
thing is doubtful in a way that allows for times at which some things are
certain.24
Now it might be granted that in these important passages from the Sev-
enth Replies Descartes is allowing that although in some sense everything is
doubtful, he has certainty of some claims prior to the conclusion of the theo-
logical argument; but it might be argued that the certainty he is allowing
himself here is merely psychological certainty. Such a claim would go
against the case for the rejection of the antecedent of (A) that I am proposing.
However, for reasons given earlier, I do not think that the interpretation of
Descartes as starting out the Third Meditation with only psychological cer-
tainty is persuasive. Descartes' doctrine of compelled assent seems, as I
argued, to be normative in character and thus the kind of compelled assent
that currently intuited clear and distinct ideas involve may well be compelled
assent by virtue of good reasons. Thus, contrary to the claims of those who
accept the antecedent of (A), the passages in which Descartes seems to doubt
all do not - in part for reasons given explicitly by Descartes him-
self - support the view that, as he enters the theological argument he has no
normative certainty.25
Another passage in the same vein occurs in the Second Replies: "when I said that we can
know [scire] nothing for certain until we are aware that God exists, I expressly declared
that I was speaking only of knowledge [sciential of those conclusions which can be
recalled when we are no longer attending to the arguments by means of which we
deduced them" (AT VII 140, CSM II 100)
5 This reading helps to defuse a criticism that DeRose in particular stresses against this kind
of interpretation. (His comments are directed against van Cleve's interpretation which is
similar to my own.) The passage in question is translated by Haldane and Ross (whose
translation DeRose here uses, following van Cleve) as: "If I find that there is a God, I
must also inquire whether he may be a deceiver; for without a knowledge of these two
The case against the antecedent of (A) can be summarized in the following
way. To the claim that the antecedent of (A) is true because Descartes says
that he doubts everything as he begins the theological argument, I respond by
pointing out the passages in which Descartes helpfully cashes out in tempo-
ral terms his claims about the doubtfulness of everything. The case for seeing
the certainty in question here as merely psychological, as the defenders of the
antecedent of (A) would hold, is not strong and, indeed, the evidence seems to
point in the other direction: Descartes seems to regard the certainty he has at
the outset, the certainty that compelled assent involves, as normative in char-
acter.
Thus despite the initial prospect that the antecedent of (A) is unassailable,
I have argued that, on the contrary, the textual evidence supports the rejec-
tion of this claim. In fact, I am aware of no passage that is clearly incom-
patible with the rejection of the antecedent of (A) and with the claim that
Descartes has normative certainty of all currently clearly and distinctly per-
ceived ideas. I admit, of course, that Descartes does not in the Third Medita-
tion launch his theological argument with the production of retrospective
certainty as his explicit goal.26 But given that Descartes explicitly states in
many other places (including the Fifth Meditation, the Second Replies, Prin-
ciples I 13, and the Conversation with Burman) that retrospective certainty is
his goal, and given that, in the Replies, he explicitly claims that we should
understand his universal doubt and the endeavor to remove it in terms of a
concern with retrospective certainty, I regard the interpretation I am offering
as warranted.
Not only is the rejection of the antecedent of (A) textually well-grounded,

it allows us to attribute to Descartes a position that is free from the philoso-
phical and textual objections that plague Gewirth-style interpretations. Once
truths I do not see that I can ever be certain of anything" (Haldane and Ross, I 159). For
DeRose, this suggests that Descartes has no normative certainty prior to the theological
argument. But a better translation of the last part of this passage is in CSM: "For if I do
not know this, it seems that I can never be quite certain about anything else." (The Latin
is: hac enimre ignorata, non videor de ulla alia plane certus esse unquam posse.) The
"seems" here indicates that Descartes is not certain what to say about whether every-
thing is in doubt. Read this way, the passage does not commit Descartes to saying that ini-
tially he has no normative certainty. (I am indebted here to Broughton who makes a
similar point in "Skepticism and the Cartesian Circle," p. 606, and in Descartes 's Method
of Doubt, p. 182.) Apart from this translation issue, there is further reason to think that this
passage need not be seen as incompatible with my interpretation (or Van Cleve's inter-
pretation for that matter). This passage, especially in light of the Seventh Replies, can be
read as elliptical for "I can never be quite certain about anything else as long as I am not
currently perceiving those things clearly and distinctly" The passage from the Seventh
Replies that I have stressed shows that this kind of qualification is one that Descartes is
quite willing to make. Van Cleve does not appreciate this point and so he makes unneces-
sarily heavy weather of this passage (p. 67n30). DeRose's criticism is on p. 223. Sosa
raises a similar objection to Van Cleve (p. 235).
Wilson (p. 235n37) emphasizes this.
we see Descartes as normatively certain of some claims prior to the conclu-
sion of the theological argument, indeed once we see him as normatively cer-
tain of all currently clearly and distinctly perceived ideas, then we can see
Descartes as entitled to rely on the premises of his theological argument. All
of these premises are ones that Descartes explicitly claims to perceive clearly
and distinctly.27 Thus the conclusion Descartes draws from these normatively
certain premises, viz. that God is not a deceiver, is also normatively certain
for him (or at least we cannot say that the conclusion is not normatively cer-
tain on the ground that some or all of the premises are not normatively cer-
tain). In this way, we can see how, unlike Gewirth-style views, this interpre-
tation does not have Descartes violating (A), the claim that he cannot acquire
normative certainty of God's veracity by argument if he starts out with only
psychological certainty. This preservation of (A) is, as we have seen, an
advantage for any interpretation of Descartes
This justification in believing that God is not a deceiver - a justification
that Descartes has on my interpretation - allows Descartes to be normatively
certain of claims that he merely recalls having clearly and distinctly perceived.
This gives Descartes scientia, something that the atheist lacks.
So on my interpretation, Descartes has a suitably ambitious epistemo-
logical goal: he seeks to reach normative, and not merely psychological, cer-
tainty of the claim that God is not a deceiver, and he seeks to exploit this
result in order to produce normative retrospective certainty of his clear and
distinct ideas. However, on my view, contrary to the Gewirth-style views,
Descartes does not provide himself with so exiguous a starting point that he
can never legitimately hope to achieve his normative epistemic aims. Fur-
ther, my interpretation seems well-grounded textually.
V. Other Interpretations that Reject the Antecedent of (A)

To clarify this interpretation, it will be helpful to compare it with some other
interpretations that, like my own, reject the antecedent of (A). I should repeat,
however, that I cannot hope to do justice here to all the insightful competing
interpretations of Descartes.
As I have argued, Descartes not only holds that he enters the theological
argument with normative certainty of some claims, but he also holds that he
is normatively certain of each currently clearly and distinctly perceived idea.
To this extent, my interpretation agrees with the so-called memory interpreta-
tion and with the temporal interpretation of Etchemendy.28 Where my view
differs from theirs is in the role it assigns to the argument for the existence
and veracity of God. On the memory interpretation, the point of the argument
27 See note 2.
See Doney, "The Cartesian Circle"; Etchemendy, "The Cartesian Circle: Circulus ex
Tempore"
is to validate Descartes' memory claims about clear distinct ideas: God is
needed to guarantee the accuracy of my memory of clearly and distinctly per-
ceiving a particular claim. On Etchemendy's interpretation, Descartes' aim in
the argument is to show that what was clearly and distinctly perceived at tj
and what was thus true at t,, is still true now (at t2). Each of these interpreta-
tions has been well-refiited in the literature29 and I will not go over all the
reasons against them here. The main point I want to bring out is that each
fails to recognize that Descartes' doubt is not about memory or about the
continuing truth of particular propositions, but about whether what was
clearly and distinctly perceived at tj (and what I correctly remember having
clearly and distinctly perceived at tj) was true even at t,. My view accommo-
dates this retrospective character of Descartes' doubt.
Some other interpretations deny, as mine does, the antecedent of (A), i.e.,
hold that Descartes starts off with more than psychological certainty of at
least some claims, but, unlike mine, hold that it is not the case that all clear
and distinct ideas are normatively certain when they are attended to. I will
briefly consider two such views and explain some of the reasons why I reject
them.
First there is Janet Broughton's reading according to which some clear and
distinct ideas are normatively certain prior to the proof of God's veracity, but
other clear and distinct ideas (perhaps the majority of them) are not initially
normatively certain and require the theological argument in order to achieve
that status.30 We need not here go into the details of Broughton's way of dis-
tinguishing the first class of clear and distinct ideas from the second class.
This interpretation is ingenious and compelling in many ways, but (apart
from other textual and philosophical difficulties) one of the main reasons I do
not accept it is the following. Broughton cannot handle those passages from
the Conversation with Burman and the Seventh Replies that indicate that for
Descartes all clear and distinct ideas are subject to retrospective doubt and all
clear and distinct ideas are at the time they are perceived not subject to doubt.
Broughton draws a distinction in the class of clear and distinct ideas that has
insufficient textual grounding and is indeed contradicted by some key texts.
DeRose has a very subtle interpretation that, like mine and Broughton's,
denies the antecedent of (A), yet his interpretation does so in a very different
way.31 For DeRose all clear and distinct ideas at the outset do have more epis-
temic standing than mere psychological certainty. Here I agree. But, says
DeRose, despite being epistemically valuable, all clear and distinct ideas ini-
tially lack full-blown normative certainty. They achieve their higher status
29 See Frankfurt, "Memory and the Cartesian Circle" on the memory interpretation;
Bennett, "Truth and Stability," p. 90, on the temporal interpretation.
See Broughton, "Skepticism and the Cartesian Circle," "The Method of Doubt," and
Descartes' Method of Doubt.
Sosa's elegant interpretation is similar to DeRose's, as Sosa acknowledges, p. 246n20.
only later once Descartes has carried out his proof of God's veracity. DeRose
claims that for Descartes until one has allayed the metaphysical doubt by
proving that God is not a deceiver, one's clear and distinct ideas are not cer-
tain, even when they are currently perceived and despite having some epis-
temic value. As DeRose says, "Descartes does hold that one is psychologi-
cally incapable of doubting what one clearly and distinctly perceives - at least
while one is clearly and distinctly perceiving it. But one still has a reason for
doubting these things - the metaphysical reason - and they are in this evalua-
tive, rather than psychological, sense doubtful" (p. 236nlO, see also p. 224
and p. 235n7). As with Broughton's interpretation, this one, I believe, fails
to do justice to the texts I have marshaled which indicate that Descartes'
doubt of clear and distinct ideas is a purely retrospective affair and that, for
Descartes, at the moment they are perceived clear and distinct ideas are not at
all doubtful and indeed are normatively certain.32
My view is, in its basic strategy, most like those of Cottingham and Van
Cleve.33 However, I have given a fuller account of the complex ways in
which psychological certainty, as Descartes conceives it, bears on this type of
interpretation (e.g. I have considered how for Descartes compelled assent may
simply be normatively compelled assent). Further, as we will see, I take up
objections to this type of interpretation that Cottingham and Van Cleve do
not deal with or do not deal with adequately, and I bolster this interpretation
by linking it to a broader metaphysical and epistemological outlook in a
wholly new way. It is to these objections and to this broader outlook that I
now turn.
VI. A Temporal Objection to my Interpretation together with my Reply

I want now to take on several related objections to the interpretation I have
presented, objections that will lead us to see how Descartes tries in some way
to disentangle God from epistemology. The first objection arises in this way.
On my view, while he attends (say, at tj) to the clear and distinct idea of
proposition p, Descartes is normatively certain of p. However, when (say, at
t2) Descartes no longer perceives this idea clearly and distinctly, but merely
correctly recalls that he did perceive it clearly and distinctly, Descartes can,
with reason, doubt that p is true by raising the skeptical hypothesis that he
may be mistaken even in what seems most evident to him, even in his clear
32 Although I am unsure about whether Newman and Nelson should be read as denying the
antecedent of (A), I do see their interpretation as foundering on a similar point: for them,
as for DeRose, clear and distinct ideas are not at the outset normatively certain when
grasped. I have other qualms about DeRose' s interpretation, in particular about his view
that in some way Descartes would be willing to accept, in this context, an epistemically
circular argument. But I do not have space to discuss this objection here.
In fact, Cottingham emphasizes some of the same passages that I do. Van Cleve, though
he has a similar position, fails to mention the Burman passages and the passages from the
Replies that lend most support to the interpretation Van Cleve presents.
and distinct ideas. (This doubt of ideas that were but are no longer clearly and
distinctly perceived lasts only until Descartes proves that God is not a de-
ceiver.) Thus my view involves the following two claims: First, at t2 Des-
cartes doubts that p (and indeed doubts all else) by considering the skeptical
hypothesis that he may be wrong even in his clear and distinct ideas, and sec-
ond, Descartes is at t, normatively certain that p (which he clearly and dis-
tinctly perceived at that time). But - and here is the objection - aren't these
two claims inconsistent? Doesn't the later doubt of p and all other clear and
distinct ideas show that Descartes' earlier grasp of p was not in fact norma-
tively certain? Thus, if Descartes has reason to doubt p at t2, then he must
also have reason to doubt p at t,, i.e., he is not normatively certain at t,. To
hold, as I do, that Descartes is (or regards himself as being) normatively cer-
tain of p at tj is, it may now seem, to saddle Descartes with an incoherent
position.34
However the threat of inconsistency is illusory. Descartes' doubt at t2 of p
stems from his consideration of the claim that even his clear and distinct ideas
may be mistaken and from the fact that Descartes does not at t2 have a proof
that his clear and distinct ideas must be true. Since that is how the doubt at t2
arises, the doubt at t2 of p would by itself show that Descartes' clear and dis-
tinct apprehension of p at t{ is (or was) also doubtful and not normatively
certain if and only if Descartes' earlier apprehension of p is based on the
claim that clear and distinct ideas in general are true and on the claim that
Descartes' current idea (at tj) of p is clearly and distinctly perceived. If Des-
cartes' claim at tx has this basis, then since Descartes at tj as well as at t2
lacks a proof of the truth of clear and distinct ideas in general, then his grasp
of p would be doubtful and not normatively certain. But if Descartes' appre-
hension of p at t, is not based on the claim that his grasp of p at tj is clear
and distinct and the claim that clearly and distinctly perceived ideas must be
true, then the fact that Descartes lacks at t2 and at t, a proof of the truth of
clear and distinct ideas in general would not by itself go to show that the idea
was doubtful attP
Now on my interpretation, Descartes' belief in p at tj is not based in this
way on the clarity and distinctness of his apprehension of p at tj.35 Descartes'
34 Wilson considers this kind of objection, in Descartes, p. 134. The objection here is
roughly the reverse of an objection Bourdin raises against Descartes in the Seventh
Replies. Bourdin worries, in effect, how Descartes can be certain of a proposition at a
later time if he was in doubt about it at an earlier time. The current objection is: how can
Descartes be certain of a claim at an earlier time if he is in doubt about it later? Notice
that Descartes' answer to Bourdin 's objection is in general terms that would apply to both
kinds of cases: something may be doubtful at one time, yet certain at others. Descartes
says that Bourdin wrongly suggests "that the reasons which may from time to time give us
cause to doubt something are not legitimate or sound unless they prove that the same thing
must be permanently in doubt" (AT VII 460, CSM II 309).
35 I foreshadowed this point in the third paragraph of section I of this paper.
certainty at t, is simply a matter of seeing that p is true while attending to
this claim (and to the demonstration of this claim, if it requires demonstra-
tion). In particular, at t,, Descartes does not need to reflect on his idea, grasp
that it is clear and distinct and also grasp the truth of the claim that clear and
distinct ideas in general must be true. His certainty at tj simply requires him
to have the idea and to perceive it clearly and distinctly. As Descartes says of
himself in one of the Burman passages quoted earlier,
[H]e knows that he is not deceived with regard to them [particular axioms], because he is
actually paying attention to them. And for as long as he does pay attention to them, he is certain
that he is not being deceived. (AT V 148, CSMK 334)
Here we have Descartes saying, in effect, that certainty of p is simply a mat-

ter of clearly and distinctly perceiving a claim.36 This certainty does not
require Descartes to have at t{ a proof of the claim that clear and distinct ideas
in general are true. This certainty does not require even an independent argu-
ment for the more narrow claim that this particular perception (i.e., his per-
ception now, at ti, of p) is not illusory.37 Nor does his certainty require cer-
tainty that his idea is indeed clear and distinct. Certainty at tx is simply a
matter of clearly and distinctly perceiving at t, that/7 is true. In this way, we
can see that Descartes is a kind of externalist with regard to the justification
of current clear and distinct perceptions. A current clear and distinct perception
gives us knowledge or certainty even without our "checking up" on that per-
ception and realizing that clear and distinct ideas in general must be true.
At t2 when Descartes no longer perceives p clearly and distinctly, he no
longer has the kind of certainty that clear and distinct perception by itself
affords. For this reason, certainty at t2 requires showing (or being able to
show?) that his current or his past perception of p is in fact a grasp of some-
thing true. In other words, at t2, though not at t,, Descartes is (with good
reason) vulnerable to skeptical hypotheses according to which he does not and
did not grasp the truth with regard to p and thus the later, retrospective doubt
is not inconsistent with the earlier normative certainty.
Van Cleve, "Foundationalism," p. 69, and Kenny, Descartes, p. 194, make this point well.
On my interpretation, Descartes may well have a non-independent argument for the non-
illusoriness of his perception of p simply by virtue of having at t, the clear and distinct
idea of p. While having the clear and distinct idea of p, Descartes could argue non-inde-
pendently in the following way: p is true; therefore I am not deceived with regard to p in
my current perception of its truth; this perception is thus not illusory. (Recall that Des-
cartes says in the important Burman passage quoted above that he is certain he is not be-
ing deceived in his acceptance of particular axioms.) This argument for the non-illusori-
ness of his perception fails to be independent because its premise (that p is true) is
something he's entitled to only by virtue of having the perception of p in question. An
independent argument for the non-illusoriness of the perception would be one that does
not rely on a premise that one is entitled to simply by virtue of having the perception in
question.
VII. Deeper Worries and the Creation of the Eternal Truths
A pair of deeper worries now arises, once we examine more closely the
claim - highlighted in my answer to the preceding objection - that Descartes
is certain of currently clearly and distinctly perceived ideas simply by virtue
of the fact that he does perceive those ideas clearly and distinctly. As Margaret
Wilson says, describing (Nottingham's similar interpretation, "it is a feature
ofp's being 'most manifest' to him [Descartes] that he knows he's not being
deceived" (p. 134). For Descartes, on my view, it seems that it is part of the
nature of clear and distinct ideas to be normatively certain. Indeed, it seems
that it is, in some sense, necessary that clear and distinct ideas have this
status in that, for Descartes, it is in virtue of their clarity and distinctness
that clear and distinct ideas are all normatively certain. In several places, Des-
cartes explicitly invokes such a necessary connection between clarity and dis-
tinctness and normative certainty. Consider first the two passages from the
Conversation with Burman that I have employed. In the first such passage,
Descartes says that he is certain of particular axioms because (quoniam) he
attends to them (AT V 148, CSMK 334). This suggests that there is some
kind of necessary connection between Descartes' clear and distinct perception
and his certainty. In the second passage, Descartes says that when we attend
to particular ideas that we grasp clearly and distinctly "we cannot be in any
doubt about them" (non possumus de Us dubitare; AT V 178, CSMK 353).
On the assumption, for which I have argued, that this inability to doubt is an
inability to doubt that is based on good reasons, Descartes is saying here that
attended-to clear and distinct ideas cannot fail to be normatively certain. In
both passages, the view seems to be that the fact that a given clear and dis-
tinct idea is normatively certain is not an accident but is somehow necessary.
Further evidence for this view comes from passages not yet discussed. Ear-
lier in the Conversation with Burman, Descartes says that some simple prin-
ciples or axioms "cannot be denied by anyone who carefully focuses his atten-
tion on them" (ea ab eo, qui attente ad ilia animadvertit, negari non
possunt; AT V 146, CSMK 333). If we grant, as I have argued, that Des-
cartes' interest in the indubitability of a claim (or, presumably, its undeni-
ability) is an interest in normative indubitability in particular, then in this
passage he is saying that ideas that we attend to carefully (i.e., presumably,
clearly and distinctly) are and must be normatively indubitable. Again there
seems to be a necessary connection between clarity and distinctness and nor-
mative certainty.
An important passage from the Third Meditation corroborates this point.
Descartes says: "Whatever is revealed to me by the natural light - for example
that from the fact that I am doubting it follows that I exist, and so
on - cannot in any way be doubtful" (AT VII 38, CSM II 27). The natural
light is, as I noted earlier, the faculty of clear and distinct perception (see
Principles I 30). Thus Descartes' point here is that clear and distinct ideas
cannot be doubtful. Once again assuming that Descartes' interest in the
inability to doubt amounts to an interest in that which is normatively indubi-
table, we can see that in this passage Descartes is claiming that clear and dis-
tinct ideas are necessarily normatively certain.
This aspect of my interpretation seems to lead directly to two related and
important objections. First, as Wilson puts the point (in a passage part of
which I quoted above):
If it is a feature of p's being 'most manifest' to him that he knows he's not being deceived, then
it is not 'easy' for God to bring it about that he's deceived 'even in his most distinct intuitions.'
But this proposition is not one that Descartes can nonchalantly abandon as a temporary mis-
conception. To deny it would surely be to acknowledge a striking limitation on God's power,
(p. 134; see also Wilson's review of Cottingham's edition of the Conversation with Burman, p.
456).
Here Wilson is invoking a crucial passage near the beginning of the Third
Meditation where Descartes says:
Whenever this pre-conceived opinion of the pre-eminent power of God occurs to me, it is not
possible for me not to allow that if He wishes, it is easy for Him to bring it about that I err, even
about those things which I think I intuit as evidently as possible by the eyes of the mind. (AT
VII 36, CSM II 25; I follow Wilson's translation of this passage on her p. 134 which is more
literal than CSM's translation.)
Descartes is here expressing the view that only God's will - and presumably
the goodness of God's will - stands in the way of his making clear and dis-
tinct ideas false. This is indicated by Descartes' appealing to God's will later
in the Third Meditation to rule out this possibility. There is no suggestion in
the text that Descartes thinks that there is some other independent reason that
God could not make clear and distinct ideas false. Thus, as Wilson claims, it
does seem that for Descartes God does have power over current clear and dis-
tinct ideas, that he can make them false if he wishes.
But if clear and distinct ideas are by nature normatively certain (and thus
true), it seems that God does not, contrary to what Descartes explicitly says,
have the power to make them false (and thus not normatively certain).38
Since I do not want to come into conflict with one of Descartes' central
38 It might be thought that the claim that God might make our clear and distinct ideas false is
merely a claim of epistemic and not of metaphysical possibility. If that's the case, then
there would be no conflict between the claim that clear and distinct ideas are by nature
normatively certain and true and the claim that it is (epistemically) possible for God to
make clear and distinct ideas false. However, it is not plausible that Descartes' claim
here is a mere claim of epistemic possibility. This is because Descartes does, as we will
see shortly, hold rather strong views on God's power which he sees as extending to the
truth or falsity of the so-called eternal truths. The vastness of God's power, in Descartes'
eyes, indicates that his claim here is not a mere claim of epistemic possibility. Wilson also
stresses this point, as we will see.
theses about God's power, this is a potentially very serious problem for my
view.
However, Descartes would have a direct response to this objection: he

would reject any inference from the power of God over the truth of clear and
distinct ideas to the claim that, therefore, clear and distinct ideas are not nec-
essarily or by nature true (and thus not necessarily or by nature normatively
certain). This inference is an instance of a kind that Descartes explicitly and
often rejects. For Descartes, the fact that God has power over the truth of a
proposition attributing a feature to a given thing does not entail that that
proposition is not necessary, nor does it entail that that feature is not part of
the nature of the thing in question. Thus the fact that God has power over the
truth of clear and distinct ideas does not entail that it is not necessary that
clear and distinct ideas are true and normatively certain and does not entail that
clear and distinct ideas are not by nature true and normatively certain.
The general doctrine at work here is simply Descartes' famous, notorious,
and famously notorious doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. Des-
cartes holds the view that God has, or least had, power over the eternal truths,
such as, e.g., "squares have four sides." The following are representative pas-
sages:39
You... ask what necessitated God to create these truths; and I reply that he was free to make it
not true that all the radii of the circle are equal - just as free as he was not to create the world.
(Letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, AT I 152, CSMK 25)
I turn to the difficulty of conceiving how God would have been acting freely and indifferently
if he had made it false that the three angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, or in
general that contradictories could not be true together. It is easy to dispel this difficulty by
considering that the power of God cannot have any limits. (Letter to Mesland, 2 May 1644, AT
IV 11 8, CSMK 235)
I do not think that we should ever say of anything that it cannot be brought about by God. For
since every basis of truth and goodness depends on his omnipotence, I would not dare to say
that God cannot make a mountain without a valley, or bring it about that 1 and 2 are not 3
(Letter for Arnauld, 29 July 1648, AT V 224, CSMK 358-59).
Thus, for Descartes, God's free will somehow made it true that, for example,
squares have four sides. I will call the proposition that squares have four sides
"/?". It might be thought that this freedom on the part of God precludes p
from being necessary. But Descartes denies this. On the contrary, he holds
that God not only wills p to be true, but that he also wills p to be necessary
and that/? is therefore necessary. Descartes says:
39 Some of the material in the rest of this paragraph and in the next paragraph is adapted
from my paper, "'If a Body Meet a Body: Descartes on Body-Body Causation", pp. 63-
65.
I do not think that the essences of things, and the mathematical truths which we can know
concerning them, are independent of God. Nevertheless I do think that they are immutable and
eternal, since the will and decree of God willed and decreed that they should be so. (AT VII
380,CSMII261)
[I]t is because he [God] willed that the three angles of a triangle should necessarily equal two
right angles that this is true and cannot be otherwise; and so on in other cases. (AT VII 432,
CSMII291)
In a similar vein Descartes says in the letter to Mesland that there are "things
which God could have made possible, but which he has nevertheless wished
to make impossible" (AT IV 118, CSMK 235). Thus for Descartes p is nec-
essary in virtue of God's willing p to be necessary.40
Descartes also makes clear that God has the power freely to impose
natures on things. In the Fifth Replies, Descartes says that the essences of
things are not independent of God (AT VII 380, CSM II 261). The context
here makes clear that the essences of thing are not independent of God's will
in particular. In the letter of 27 May 1630 to Mersenne, Descartes says that
God "is the author of the essence created things, no less than of their exis-
tence; and this essence is nothing other than the eternal truths" (AT I 152,
CSMK 25).
Thus we can see that Descartes would say that despite God's power over
the truth (and normative certainty) of clear and distinct ideas, such ideas can
nevertheless be necessarily or by their very nature true (and normatively cer-
tain). There is, for Descartes, no genuine incompatibility here between God's
power over clear and distinct ideas and the fact that those ideas are necessarily
and by their very nature true and normatively certain. Thus Wilson's objec-
tion is avoided.41
40 On this point, see Beyssade, La philosophie premiere de Descartes, p. 112. Frankfurt and
Plantinga adopt the contrary view that for Descartes claims such as p are, after all, con-
tingent. Frankfurt: "the eternal truths are inherently as contingent as any other proposi-
tions," ("Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths," p. 42). Plantinga: "Every truth
is within his [God's] control; and hence no truth is necessary," {Does God have a
Nature?, p. 113). See also Van Cleve, "The Destruction of the Eternal Truths."
Although in some passages (such as some of those quoted above), Descartes claims only
that God could have made eternal truths other than they are, and although in some pas-
sages he stresses that God does not now have power over the eternal truths (e.g. AT V
360, CSMK 343; AT VII 380, CSM II 261), nevertheless he does suggest elsewhere that
God can make eternal truths other than they are. For example, Descartes says in an
important letter to Mesland "the power of God cannot have any limits [la puissance de
Dieu ne peut auoir aucunes bornes]" (AT IV 118, CSMK 235). Consider also these pas-
sages: "I do not think that we should ever say of anything that it cannot [posse] be
brought about by God. For since every basis of truth and goodness depends on his
omnipotence, I would not dare to say that God cannot make a mountain without a valley,
or bring it about that 1 and 2 are not 3" (AT V 223-24, CSMK 358-59); "I am not so bold
as to assert ...that he [God] cannot do what conflicts with my conception of things - I
merely say that it involves a contradiction" (AT V 272, CSMK 363). So there is reason to
think that Descartes' views on whether God has or only had power over the eternal truths
But to see Descartes as taking this way out of the objection might seem
rather uncharitable. For how could Descartes have reason to deny that God's
power over certain truths shows that they are not genuinely necessary? To
avoid a problem with Descartes' approach to the Cartesian Circle by making
such an unwarranted denial seems, if anything, only to get Descartes into
even deeper philosophical trouble. This may be so, but the philosophical
trouble here is trouble that Descartes does not shy away from and, indeed, in
some sense, Descartes' philosophical system thrives upon such trouble. To
hold that we cannot draw the expected implications from God's activity is, I
believe, a manifestation of one or both of two central aspects of Descartes'
conception of God.
First, Descartes clearly holds that certain aspects of God's activity are
incomprehensible, and he emphasizes this incomprehensibility in his discus-
sions of the doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths (AT I 146, CSMK
23; AT IV 118, CSMK 235; AT VII 436, CSM II 294). If God's activity is
incomprehensible, then we should not be surprised that that activity does not
have the implications one would standardly expect.
The second fact about Descartes' conception of God that may help explain
why Descartes claims that the standard implications do not hold is his view
that certain predicates do not apply univocally to God and to his creatures.
(Descartes makes a general appeal to this lack of univocity in AT VII 137,
433, CSM II 98, 292; AT V 347, CSMK 375.) Normally we would expect
that if it is in the power of the free will of an agent to make a proposition p
false, then that proposition is not necessary. (Thus, e.g., if I have power over
the truth or falsity of the proposition that I raise my hand at tt, then that
proposition is not necessary.) But if Descartes holds that the predicate "has
power over p" does not apply univocally to created things, such as myself,
and to God, then there is room for Descartes to say that, contrary to our
expectations, the claim that God has the power to make a proposition false
are unsettled. But, in any event, the general lesson I draw in the text still remains, viz. that
since God's power over the eternal truths does not spoil their necessity, God's power
over clear and distinct ideas does not spoil the necessity of their truth. (Nottingham in his
response to Wilson's objection stresses that God's power over the eternal truths, and in
particular over the claim that clear and distinct ideas are normatively certain, is tempo-
rally limited (p. 76n22). This puts Cottingham in what I see as the uncomfortable position
of denying that for Descartes it is easy for God to make clear and distinct ideas false. In
addition to the unclarity over the temporal scope of the creation doctrine, there is much
unclarity as to whether absolutely every eternal truth is subject to God's free will. I tend
to think that the answer to this question is "yes", but the matter is controversial, see, e.g.
Wells, "Descartes' Uncreated Eternal Truths", Curley, "Descartes on the Creation of the
Eternal Truths," pp. 592-97, Wilson, Descartes, pp. 123-26. Again, however, as far as I
can see this aspect of the doctrine is not relevant here. As long as Descartes allows fairly
broad scope for God's creative power over the eternal truths, my strategy for responding
to Wilson's objection can go forward, even if the creation doctrine does not extend to
absolutely every eternal truth.
does not entail that that proposition is not necessary. In the next section, I
will briefly discuss other cases in which there may be an appeal to a lack of
univocity of certain predicates that can be applied to God and to creatures.
I believe it is this incomprehensibility and lack of univocity that Des-
cartes associates with God that enable him to accord maximal power to God
while still doing justice to the necessity of the eternal truths and to the built-
in normative certainty of clear and distinct ideas. Or, to put the point another
way, for Descartes, any view that holds that any power of God over the eter-
nal truths would undermine their necessity would fail to do justice to the
incomprehensibly enormous power of God. In particular, to say that God can
have power over the truth and normative certainty of clear and distinct ideas
only if those ideas are not necessarily or by nature true and normatively cer-
tain would, on this way of thinking, be to limit God's power in an unaccept-
able way. It is precisely because God's power is enormous that, for Descartes,
we should not shy away from these kinds of paradoxical claims about God's
power.
I want to turn now to a related important objection the answer to which
will shed crucial light on the character of the epistemological position Des-
cartes is, on my interpretation, endorsing. As we have seen, Descartes' strat-
egy is to maximize God's power over our clear and distinct ideas and yet to
claim that these ideas are normatively certain simply by virtue of being
apprehended and, in particular, without our having to conduct an independent
check on whether or not God is deceiving us with regard to clear and distinct
ideas. But to the extent that God's power over our clear and distinct ideas is
great it might seem that it is all the more urgent to check up on God, as it
were, in order for those ideas - even currently perceived clear and distinct
ideas - to be normatively certain. Nonetheless, Descartes says that, in the
case of clear and distinct ideas, we are exempt from having to do such check-
ing. Why should this be so?
The puzzlement here becomes even greater when we consider that
throughout the early Meditations Descartes explicitly requires an independent
check for one's ideas to be certain. This certainly seems to be the procedure
throughout the increasingly severe doubts raised in the First Meditation and it
seems to be an internalist procedure. But now all of a sudden when Descartes
turns to currently apprehended clear and distinct ideas, he goes externalist and
says that no independent check is needed for normative certainty. Why does he
apparently drop the ball so late in the game, when we are, in effect, up
against the most potentially insidious power - God's power over even cur-
rently perceived clear and distinct ideas? It might seem that here if anywhere
we need to be more, not less, vigilant and that Descartes' newfound insouci-
ance about an independent check is somewhat perverse.
The proper response to these charges should be obvious from my answer
to the first objection. God is an exception, and so in the face of God's power
the standard requirements for normative certainty do not apply. We need not
worry about God's power over our current clear and distinct ideas precisely
because that power is so incomprehensible. For Descartes, God's power is
vast and non-threatening, and indeed non-threatening because it is so vast.
So in response to certain key objections to my interpretation of Descartes'
way of handling the Cartesian Circle, I have invoked his exotic views on the
exceptional status of God's power and, in particular, his views on the creation
of the eternal truths. This reveals a much closer connection between the doc-
trine of the creation of the eternal truths and the Cartesian Circle than has
typically been appreciated. Some have argued that the creation doctrine is
important in engendering Descartes' most radical doubt - the doubt about
clear and distinct ideas.42 This may be so, but here I'm stressing the wholly
distinct point that the creation doctrine not only gets Descartes into the
doubt, but also helps Descartes get out of the doubt. It does this by obviating
certain objections to what is, as I have argued, his anti-skeptical strategy.43
VIII. Analogous Cases and Epistemology without God

Despite this use to which the creation doctrine might be put, can we be sure
that Descartes would be happy to employ this doctrine in order to support his
epistemology? It must be admitted that Descartes does not explicitly invoke
the creation doctrine to deal with epistemological difficulties in the way that I
have. But the key moves of treating God's power as incomprehensible and as
a univocity-spoiling exception are ones that Descartes quite explicitly makes
in aspects of his system in addition to the case of the eternal truths which, as
I have argued, helps out his epistemology. The prevalence of the basic proce-
dure I see as at work in the case of the eternal truths and the Cartesian Circle
lends indirect, but significant support to the defense of my understanding of

Descartes' way of handling the Cartesian Circle. In this regard, I would like
to examine briefly some of Descartes' views on freedom, substance, and cau-
sation. I should stress that in none of these cases can I hope to offer here a
complete treatment of the relevant issues.
First, freedom. In his account of freedom, Descartes at one point appeals
to the incomprehensibility of God's activity in a way that mirrors the appeal
to incomprehensibility in connection with the creation of the eternal truths.
42 See Wilson, pp. 128-31; Brehier, "The Creation of the Eternal Truths in Descartes's
System"; Gewirth, "The Cartesian Circle," p. 373; Gewirth, "The Cartesian Circle
Reconsidered," pp. 674-75; Murdoch, "The Cartesian Circle," pp. 224-27.
Cottingham misses this important point. He sees the creation doctrine as merely a threat to
certainty and so he tries to limit the scope of that doctrine. I see the creation doc-
trine - precisely by virtue of its extreme claims about God's incomprehensible
power - as safeguarding certainty and, by no means, a threat.
In Principles 1 41, Descartes says that God willed and preordained whatever is
or can be. He goes on to say:
We may attain sufficient knowledge of this power to perceive clearly and distinctly that God
possesses it; but we cannot get a sufficient grasp of it to see how it leaves the free actions of
men undetermined. Nonetheless we have such close awareness of the freedom and indiffer-
ence which is in us, that there is nothing we can grasp more evidently or more perfectly. And it
would be absurd, simply because we do not grasp one thing, which we know must by its very
nature be beyond our comprehension, to doubt something else of which we have an intimate
grasp and which we experience within ourselves.
Here Descartes seems to be saying that somehow - though exactly how is

beyond our comprehension - the fact that God wills and produces everything,
including our actions, is compatible with those actions nonetheless being
undetermined and free. That is, the incomprehensibility of God's activity
serves to undermine the following conditional:
(B) If God preordains and wills our actions, then those actions are
determined and unfree.
Descartes' rejection of this conditional is analogous, I believe, to his rejec-

tion of the conditional:
(C) If God has power over propositions such as ' 2+2=4' or 'clear and
distinct ideas are true and normatively certain', then those proposi-
tions are not necessary.
And the fact that he clearly rejects the former conditional buttresses the case
for seeing him as rejecting the latter conditional.44
Descartes' rejection of the conditional involving freedom is also impor-
tantly and explicitly bound up with the lack of univocity of a term that
applies to God and to creatures. Earlier I claimed that, for Descartes, the
predicate "has power over p" does not apply univocally to creatures and to
God. Descartes makes a similar claim - and does so more explicitly - with
regard to the notion of dependence. Descartes says in a letter to Princess
Elizabeth,
The independence which we experience and feel in ourselves, and which suffices to make our
actions praiseworthy or blameworthy, is not incompatible with a dependence of quite another
kind, whereby all things are subject to God. (AT IV 333, CSMK 277)
There may be more than just an analogue here since Descartes' claim about God's
preordination extends not just to free actions, but to "whatever is or can be" (Principles I
41). In saying that God preordains whatever can be Descartes may be referring to the
view that God has power over modal truths.
The differing kinds of dependence that Descartes refers to here are, I believe,
of a piece with the differing kinds of power that are at work in Descartes'
account of the creation of the eternal truths. Just as the power of God over the
eternal truths does not entail (contrary to what we might expect) that those
truths are not necessary, so too the dependence of our actions on God does not
entail (again, contrary to what we might expect) that those actions are not
free. Dependence of our actions on God is completely different from any
dependence those actions might have on other finite things. In particular, the
dependence on God does not have the same kind of implication that the
dependence on other finite things has.
The second case in which Descartes makes moves analogous to those I
have attributed to him in the case of the eternal truths and the Cartesian Cir-
cle concerns his account of substance.
Consider Principles 151:
By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to
depend on no other thing for its existence. And there is only one substance which can be
understood to depend on no other thing whatsoever, namely God. In the case of all other sub-
stances, we perceive that they can exist only with the help of God's concurrence. Hence the
term 'substance' does not apply univocally as they say in the Schools, to God and to other
things; that is, there is no distinctly intelligible meaning of the term which is common to God
and his creatures.
Here Descartes insists that finite things and God are not substances in the
same sense. We can see this fact as undermining the following conditional:
(D) If something x (other than God) depends on God to exist, then x

is not a substance.
This conditional would be true if the term "substance" as it appears in the

conditional were used in the way in which that term is applied to God. For,
according to that use, a substance cannot depend on anything else whatsoever;
for this reason God, as Descartes emphasizes, is the only substance according
to this sense.45 However, there is another sense of "substance" according to
which a thing is a substance just in case it depends for its existence on noth-
ing else besides God. It is this sense of substance that allows the conditional
(D) to be false. Again, just as in the case of the eternal truths and the Carte-
sian Circle, God's activity does not have the implications one would stan-
dardly expect.
Finally, Descartes' views on the causation of motion also involve a rejec-
tion of conditionals analogous to (C). As many have observed, Descartes
holds that God is the direct and sufficient cause of all motions that occur
when one body strikes another {Principles II 36ff). God's causal role here,
45 Spinoza would accept something like (D) for precisely this reason.
according to Garber and Hatfield and others, entails that for Descartes bodies
are not genuine causes of motion in bodies.46 That is, Garber and Hatfield see
Descartes as accepting the following conditional:
(E) If God is the direct and sufficient cause of all motions that occur
when one body strikes another, then bodies are not genuine causes of
motion in other bodies.
This conditional may have much plausibility; however, as I have argued

elsewhere, Descartes quite clearly rejects this conditional. For him, God's
causal role does not preclude the causation of motion by bodies. Indeed, as I
show, God's causal activity is the ground of the genuine causal activity of
bodies. Descartes does not explicitly connect his rejection of (E) to his con-
ception of the lack of univocity of certain predicates or to his conception of
God's incomprehensibility, but Descartes' use of those notions in other,
related cases makes it plausible to see them at work in his account of the
causation of motion. This is not the place to enter into the various textual
considerations in support of my interpretation of this account. The point to
emphasize here, however, is that if I am right that Descartes would reject (E),
then we have further evidence for the existence of a pattern in Descartes'
thought according to which God's causal activity - perhaps because of God's
incomprehensibility and because of the lack of univocity - does not have the
implications that one would expect. This systematic feature of Descartes'
thought - while it may not justify his rejection of (C) - does justify us, I
believe, in attributing to Descartes the rejection of that conditional.
In each of these cases, Descartes seeks to preserve an important claim
about finite creatures (that, depending on the case, they are free, substances,
causally active, necessary, or have normative certainty) while also maintain-
ing God's extreme power. Descartes treads this fine line by stressing that
God's power is not anything like the power of finite objects and is, indeed,
incomprehensible. Descartes is, in effect, saying that we can give God maxi-
mal power and then proceed not to worry about that power spoiling any valu-
able feature of finite objects. As I said, God is, for Descartes, non-threatening
despite being all-powerful; or rather, non-threatening precisely because he is
all-powerful. Indeed, when it comes to considering these valuable features of
finite objects, it is almost as if God doesn't exist. When we examine these
features, we can proceed freely without worrying about bumping into God or
stepping on his toes, as it were.48 Descartes is thus preparing the way for the
46 See especially Hatfield, "Force (God) in Descartes' Physics"; Garber, "Descartes and
Occasionalism".
47 See Delia Rocca, "if a Body Meet a Body'".
See Brehier who says that because of the creation doctrine, science is "cut off from
theology" ("The Creation of the Eternal Truths in Descartes's System," p. 202). Hatfield
development of accounts of freedom, substance, causation and modality that
proceed without any invocation of God, accounts that proceed independently
of God. And the most surprising part of all this is, perhaps, that these points
also apply to Descartes' epistemology. In some way, Descartes is starting to
make room for the view that epistemology can proceed without concerning
itself with God.49 Descartes has, as I said at the outset, begun to loosen the
ties between God and epistemology, and he does this precisely in his treat-
ment of the problem of the Cartesian Circle - that aspect of his epistemo-
logical views that might seem most bound up with God. Of course, the dis-
entangling of God and epistemology is by no means complete in Descartes,
for (to take just one case) although the normative certainty of our currently
apprehended clear and distinct ideas does not require casting one's eye back to
God, we do need to check up on God in order to have retrospective certainty.
Nonetheless, we can see in Descartes crucial steps toward a view that makes
God irrelevant to epistemology. In this way, Descartes is a surprising and
important precursor of the kind of God-detached epistemology that one will
find in different ways in Hume and Kant and so much of later epistemology.
And the paradoxical and intriguing aspect of Descartes' view here is that he
takes these steps in the context of an epistemology that is explicitly theocen-
tric in so many ways.
I should state for the record that I do not think that any of this works.
Rationalist that I am, I am, in general, no fan of the kind of incomprehensi-
ble and exceptional status that Descartes accords to God. But Descartes clearly
is a fan of such things, and his sophisticated attempt to employ such a strat-
egy throughout his metaphysics and epistemology deserves to be understood
and taken seriously. In the epistemological case in particular, while we may
not find the underpinnings of his anti-skeptical strategy very satisfying, his
mistake - if that's what it is - is nonetheless not a simple and irredeemable
blunder (as it is on so many other interpretations of Descartes), but rather it
is an intriguing and potentially very illuminating attempt to articulate what it
reaches a similar conclusion (one perhaps in tension with his views discussed in the
previous paragraph), "we can make sense of Descartes' s doctrine of the creation of the
eternal truths by seeing it as part of a strategy to divest claims to knowledge of natural es-
sences from the implication that such claims presuppose knowledge of God's creative
power" ("Reason, Nature, and God in Descartes," p. 275). To say, as I do, that for Des-
cartes, to some extent, we can proceed almost as if God does not exist is not to say that
Descartes' professions of religious and theological beliefs are insincere (for such a
reading of Descartes, see Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity, esp. pp. 10-20, 66-73, 101-
108). My view is simply that, for Descartes, while God does exist and is indeed intimately
related to finite beings, that relation, in important respects, cannot be comprehended.
For quite different reasons, Loeb ("Is There Radical Dissimulation in Descartes' Medita-
tionsT) also sees Descartes as developing, to some extent, a non-theological epistemol-
ogy-
would be to do epistemology without God. And to see this is to upend the
traditional story about Descartes's epistemology that we all know.50
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Works by Descartes
Adam, Charles, and Paul Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes,

Paris: J. Vrin, 1964-1976. (Abbreviated AT.)
Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, eds. an
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols. Cambridge
bridge University Press, 1984-1985. (Abbreviated CSM.)
Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony
trans. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3. Cam
Cambridge University Press, 1991. (Abbreviated CSMK.)
Haldane, Elizabeth S., and G.R.T. Ross, trans. The Philosophical W
Descartes, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911.
B. Other Works
Bennett, Jonathan. "Truth and Stability in Descartes' Meditations.

Journal of Philosophy, supplementary volume 16 (1990): 75-108.
Beyssade, Jean-Marie. La Philosophie Premiere de Descartes. Par
marion, 1979.
Brehier, Emile. "The Creation of the Eternal Truths in Descartes's S
In Willis Doney, ed., Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essay
192-208, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.
Broughton, Janet. Descartes's Method of Doubt. Princeton: Princeto
versity Press, 2002.
Critical Essays on Descartes, Spinoza,

Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999
losophy 14 (1984): 593-615.

Caton, Hiram. The Origin of Subjectivity
Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
Cottingham, John. Descartes. Oxford: Blackw
50 I would like to thank the many students, colleagues, and friends who discussed (and criti-
cized!) earlier versions of this paper in my Descartes' classes at Yale, at a faculty dis-
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International Phenomenological Society

Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology without God

Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and

This paper defends an interpretation of Descartes according to which he sees u

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 1

I. The Standard Interpretation of Descartes9 Problem

2 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

This apparently inevitable ineffectuality of the argument has seemed to

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 3

This point leads to a characterization in the most general terms of the

(A) If Descartes is, prior to the conclusion of his theological argu-

3 For similar characterizations of what I am calling "normative certainty", see Cottingham,

4 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

5 Bennett, "Truth and Stability," pp. 101-102, endorses (A).

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 5

II. The Case for Accepting the Antecedent of (A)

6 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

Later in the Third Meditation, Descartes says,

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 7

It might seem that in speaking of compulsion to assent, Descartes is assert-

(i) those passages cited above in which Descartes asserts that he

(ii) the interpretation of Descartes' apparent claims of certainty prior

8 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

he is normatively certain that he is not deceived.

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 9

10 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 1 1

12 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 13

Not only is the rejection of the antecedent of (A) textually well-grounded,

14 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

V. Other Interpretations that Reject the Antecedent of (A)

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 15

16 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

VI. A Temporal Objection to my Interpretation together with my Reply

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 17

18 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

Here we have Descartes saying, in effect, that certainty of p is simply a mat-

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 19

20 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 21

However, Descartes would have a direct response to this objection: he

22 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 23

24 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 25

VIII. Analogous Cases and Epistemology without God

lends indirect, but significant support to the defense of my understanding of

26 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

Here Descartes seems to be saying that somehow - though exactly how is

Descartes' rejection of this conditional is analogous, I believe, to his rejec-

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 27

Consider Principles 151:

(D) If something x (other than God) depends on God to exist, then x

This conditional would be true if the term "substance" as it appears in the

28 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

This conditional may have much plausibility; however, as I have argued

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 29

30 MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

Adam, Charles, and Paul Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes,

Bennett, Jonathan. "Truth and Stability in Descartes' Meditations.

Critical Essays on Descartes, Spinoza,

losophy 14 (1984): 593-615.

DESCARTES, THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE, AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHOUT GOD 31