Episode Details

Descartes responds to radical uncertainty with an audacious plan: find one belief so secure that nothing—not even deception itself—can shake it.

• The historical and intellectual crises of early 17th-century Europe that shaped Descartes’ project
• The motivation behind Descartes’ method of doubt as a response to skepticism
• The regress problem and why it pressures philosophers toward foundationalism
• Descartes’ strategy of withholding belief from anything that can be doubted
• Arguments from sense deception, dreaming, and the evil demon
• Why even mathematics and logic become targets of radical doubt
• The search for indubitable foundations as the starting point for knowledge
• How Descartes’ internal, first-person approach marks a turning point in modern epistemology