David Egan Philosophy

A course in early modern philosophy—which is to say, European philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is one of two required history courses for philosophy majors at Koç University, the other being a course in ancient philosophy. Koç isn’t unusual in this regard. The first university-level philosophy course I ever took was an introductory class on early modern philosophy at Harvard.

On the first day of class, I raise the question of what makes this period so important to the history of philosophy. It’s not hard to see why a course in ancient philosophy might be required: Plato and Aristotle are where it all begins. What gives the early modern period its equivalent importance?

The answer I give is that this period sets the agenda for much of what has come since. Philosophy sometimes gets portrayed—often by philosophers themselves—as a timeless struggle with timeless questions. It isn’t. It’s not just the answers that change over time. The questions change too, as well as the way in which the questions are framed. One reason for studying the history of philosophy is that it helps us understand how our present preoccupations came to take the shape that they did.

We see a distinctively modern set of preoccupations taking shape in Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. Actually, what we see is more interesting than that. Descartes had no way of knowing that he was inaugurating something that would be taught as “modern philosophy” four centuries later. His points of reference are the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, the Jesuit training of his youth, and the growing availability of ancient Greek texts in modern Latin translations. In some ways, the Meditations presents a deliberate departure from what came before. In other ways, it feels Medieval.

One reason the Meditations finds itself at the start of courses like mine is that it explicitly presents itself as a new beginning. In the first of the six Meditations that make up this short text, the Meditator reflects that much of what he’s taken himself to know in the past has proved to be wrong and that he needs to find a more secure foundation for his knowledge. (The text is written in the first person, but in a way that invites the reader to take the perspective of the Meditator, which is one reason why scholars often talk about “the Meditator” instead of “Descartes” when writing about the Meditations.)

What follows is a stress test on the Meditator’s supposed claims to know. All the evidence of my senses tells me that I’m sitting in my dressing gown by the fire, says the Meditator. I can see the room around me, feel the warmth of the fire, hear the crackling of the wood. But wait, what if I’m dreaming? All of that sensory evidence is compatible with the possibility that I’m dreaming. And if I can’t rule out the possibility that I’m dreaming, I can’t claim with confidence to know that I am in fact sitting by the fire.

Okay then, but surely my dreams are based upon something, the Meditator reasons. I wouldn’t be able to dream of dressing gowns and fires if I didn’t have some experience of those things. Or if not those specific things—I can dream of unicorns without ever having seen one, after all—at least I must have experience of their basic forms and constituent parts. Or at a minimum, surely I can trust in my knowledge of arithmetic and geometry?

Not so fast, says the Meditator. What if some malicious demon is playing tricks on me, using his supernatural powers to deceive me even about the basic elements of mathematics? Evil demons don’t come up a lot in modern philosophy but science fiction furnishes us with alternatives. I could be a brain in a vat, cunningly manipulated by an evil scientist. Or a body in a vat, as the Matrix movies suggest.

The grounds for doubt seem bottomless, the confidence in human knowledge pitifully fragile. If we allow for an evil demon or its science fiction analogues, how can we claim to know anything at all?

In the Second Meditation, the Meditator claws his way back to knowledge. Suppose an evil demon is deceiving me, the Meditator says. In order to pull off this deceit, there must be someone who’s deceived. In order to say “I am deceived,” I have to be able to say “I am.” So whatever else I may or may not know, I know this one thing with unshakeable certainty: I exist. (Descartes‘s most famous line, “I think therefore I am,” doesn’t appear in the Meditations. It comes from the Discourse on Method, published four years earlier.)

With that one piece of certainty, the Meditator has a foundation to build upon. First he asks, who is this “I” of whose existence I’m certain? The basis for this certainty is my thinking. I could still have doubts about my body. If I’m just a brain in a vat, my body is an illusion foisted on me by the evil scientist. So I can’t be certain about having a body and I can only be certain about having a mind. For that reason, the Meditator concludes, “I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks.”

Near the end of the Meditations, the Meditator reasons that he can have confidence in the existence of his body too. But a conceptual fissure remains. The reasons for having confidence in the body are different and, more importantly, the nature of mind and the nature of body are conceived as fundamentally different. Minds are essentially thinking things that don’t have any physical existence and bodies are essentially physical things that don’t think.

This conclusion is known as mind–body dualism. Descartes’s Meditator finds himself hedging uncomfortably to explain how minds and bodies nevertheless interact—how thoughts can cause bodily movements and how physical events, like a bump to the head, can cause experiences like pain in the mind. In a famous correspondence, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia presses Descartes on this point. Most readers come away feeling that Descartes fails to give a convincing answer.

No one today (or maybe almost no one—it’s a big world out there) advocates Descartes’s particular brand of substance dualism. But it’s not the answers Descartes gives that make him so influential. It’s the way he sets up an approach to philosophy such that some questions and topics become salient. The questions and topics are still with us even if Descartes’s answers seem dated.

Start with the methodological doubt of the First Meditation. It announces a new starting point for philosophy with the question “How do I know?” Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) has been around since at least Plato but it was always a minor topic compared to metaphysics. Since Descartes, epistemology has taken centre stage in philosophy. A course in epistemology—but not in metaphysics!—is also a requirement of the Koç philosophy curriculum. What’s more, Descartes’s particular way of framing problems of knowledge remains with us, with skepticism as a persistent threat and unshakeable certainty as the gold standard for knowledge.

The centrality of epistemology in modern philosophy goes hand in hand with a picture of the mind’s relation to the world that also gets its canonical formulation in the Meditations. It’s a picture that gives philosophy the task of mediating between two domains: the internal world of the mind and the external world of physical reality. The senses of sight, hearing, smell, and the rest, stand at the interface between these two domains. If all goes well, they give an accurate report of the external world that then gets represented internally in the mind. Knowledge becomes a central concern for philosophy because the relation between mind and world becomes a central conceptual issue.

You don’t have to share Descartes’s dualism to feel the influence of this picture. The very idea of a brain in a vat only makes sense to a modern audience that thinks of themselves as thinking things. The study of consciousness is a major fixation not just for philosophers but for scientists and humanists in a range of other disciplines but it wasn’t a topic that got much attention before the seventeenth century. It’s only when you start to think of consciousness as “me” that it becomes a topic of intense interest.

Part of what’s peculiar about the Meditations, as I said, is that it has one foot in the modern world and one foot in the Middle Ages. Between the Second Meditation, in which the Meditator establishes his existence as a thinking thing, and the Sixth Meditation, in which the Meditator establishes the existence of the body and outlines his mind–body dualism, we get two proofs for God’s existence. These proofs depend on premises about a hierarchy of being and the nature of ideas that would have sounded sensible to readers in the thirteenth century but that strike most twenty-first century readers as baffling and alien.

It’s as if Descartes himself didn’t quite recognize what he was doing. The approach he takes in the first two of his Meditations set a new agenda for philosophy, one that renders much of the material in the later Meditations obsolete.

But what makes those latter concerns obsolete isn’t that they’re so clearly false. It’s rather that they no longer have a grip on us in the way that they did for Europeans four centuries ago. It’s actually quite hard to argue against Descartes on these points—as my students learn to their dismay—precisely because the terms of engagement are so foreign.

Maybe twenty-fifth century philosophers will look on our preoccupations—with knowledge and certainty, with consciousness and the relation of mind and world—and wonder not, why were they so wrong, but rather, why did they think these questions were worth asking?

That, I take it, is one of the great virtues of studying the history of philosophy. It helps you not only to think with great minds of the past. It also helps you to see the preoccupations of the present in a different light. 

1. If cybercrime were a country, it would have the third largest economy in the world, behind the USA and China, and it’s growing at a rate of 15% per year. Scam centres account for a quarter of Cambodia’s GDP. (source)
2. One reason strapping young men can usually hold their drink better than the rest of us is that alcohol tolerance correlates with lean muscle mass. Muscle holds a lot more water than fat and alcohol is water-soluble, so muscle helps the body absorb and metabolize alcohol. (source)
3. An American twelfth grader today is less likely to have had a sip of alcohol in the last month than an American eighth grader in the 1980s. On the flip side, there are now more daily or near-daily users of marijuana in the United States than daily or near-daily drinkers. (source)
4. Inflation in Turkey in one number: in 2017, 1000 Turkish lira bought you a dishwasher. In 2026, it buys you a package of dish detergent. (source)
5. More British people believe in ghosts than in any god. Weirdly, more British people also believe in the existence of haunted houses than believe in ghosts. (source)
6. The world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink isn’t the Amazon rainforest. It’s the Congo basin. (source)
7. Contrary to the folk wisdom about the fragmented, individualist cultures of the rich world as breeding grounds for loneliness, loneliness correlates inversely with wealth. That applies both between countries (more people report feeling lonely in poor countries than in rich ones) and within countries (poorer people in a given country report greater feelings of loneliness than richer people). The loneliest country in the world, according to one study, is Madagascar. (source)
8. Potassium is mildly radioactive and high-potassium foods like broccoli and bananas have set off radioactive detection devices at shipping ports. (source)
9. In the mid-nineteenth century, the docks of Liverpool handled 40% of all global trade. (source)
10. The words “fidget” and “fuck” share an etymological root. (source)
11. The concept of a “deep state” originates in Turkey. “Derin devlet” was used to describe the alleged coordination of military, intelligence, and bureaucratic elites who ensured that undesirable leftist and Islamist elements were kept from gaining any significant political influence through the twentieth century. (source)
12. In the early twentieth century, nearly a third of Istanbul’s population was Greek. (source)
13. Contrary to the notion that world-class performers have a singular focus from an early age, it turns out that early specialization actually correlates negatively with world-class performance later in life. In sports, chess, classical music, and academia, there’s a pattern by which the people who end up at the top of their fields tend to be late bloomers who have a broader range of interests at a young age and then focus in on their field of choice a little later. (source)
14. The father of Nazi bigwig Hermann Göring was the colonial governor of Namibia, and laid the groundwork for the first genocide of the twentieth century, against the Herero and Nama. (source)
15. Almost all four-legged mammals—including hippos!—will have all four legs in the air at once at some point during a sprint. The one exception is elephants, which always have at least one foot on the ground. That doesn’t make them slowpokes. An elephant can reach speeds of around 15mph, which is about the same sprinting speed as the average human. (source)