Abstract

This essay looks at the Cartesian procedure of doubt, as it appears in the analyses of some of the leading figures in cultural debate in the second half of the 17th century. The essay begins by noting the reactions prompted by methodic doubt, and dwells in particular on the different interpretations given to the figure of the deus deceptor. As regards hyperbolic doubt, two differing interpretative approaches are reconstructed: the Cartesian school approach, which tends to scale down the importance of this figure, and isolate it as a simple stage along the way towards the definition of a new "criterium veritatis" (intellectual evidence); and the sceptical approach, which instead insists on the centrality of the figure of a deceptive God, and which holds that the entire development of Descartes' "Meditations" proves to be greatly invalidated by that notion. This es¬say follows this latter reading more closely, in an attempt to highlight the close inter-relationship between the sceptical arguments of the later 17th century, and the complexity of Cartesian doubt.