"In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the prevailing belief was that attainment of knowledge was a profoundly difficult and complex business.
The search for truth was seen as a laborious attempt to uncover occult powers and forces - for example, the hidden "virtues" of plants and minerals, and raw "sympathetic and antipathetic" influences governing natural objects and events.
The invoking of occult powers, and supposed sympathetic and antipathetic virtues, continued to flourish well into the seventeenth century... Philosophical knowledge as conceived by Descartes in his early writings has three main features. which we may label unity, purity, and certainty.
- By insisting on the unity of knowledge, Descartes rejected the scholastic conception of science as a set of separate disciplines, each with its own methods and level of precision. As a "separatist" view, it became entrenched dogma by the early seventeenth century as shown by the criticism Galileo received from the Italian scholastics for using mathematical reasoning in natural science.
- As for purity, Descartes felt that prevailing doctrines, though they might contain some element of truth were corrupted by a large mixture of incoherence and inaccuracy; what was needed was a system that was "free from any taint of falsity.
- The notion of certainty brings us to what is probably the most discussed aspect of Descartes conception of knowledge. In ordinary usage, one may be said to often "know" something without being certain." (Cottingham, 1986)
-Yogabrofessor
Cottingham, J. (1986). Descartes.
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