The very astute among you probably noticed that there's no class today! While it really would help to have a new car, I can't blame it today for needing to cancel. Please accept this humble substitute:

Point one: If you want to know what Descartes means by a certainty, say to yourself now and really mean it: "I am not now thinking..."

Have your eyes crossed yet? Descartes has discovered that even if all the content of his experiences of the world is false, he can not be deceived that he is now thinking.

So let's just stop here and see what he's got. Descartes has the sheer activity of thinking alone as what he can be certain about. Descartes has lost the whole world!

Skepticism comes at a price, you might say.

Now let's think of skepticism as a game, but a terrible sort of game that we take soooo seriously that we can't stop. Think of the eerie "ring around the rosy" song that opens a horror film (I think it was a Freddy-movie). The little one have to do it unto death!

Okay, enough melodrama. Now for the real-life analog.

Point Two: Skepticism has taken a life of its own after Descartes. For one, it now has gobbled up the things that Descartes exempted from his meditations - moral maxims and truths of faith. Nothing, we might say in more contemporary terms, is outside the jurisdiction of science and so noting is exempt from the sort of inquiry that demands that we 1) operationalize our definitions (that is, we ask testable questions about things) and 2) we test them with sound experimental design. More globally speaking, we live in a method-crazed age. Notice how there would be something perverse about suggesting to Diotima that you could map out how to love properly in advance of actually doing it and then simply follow the steps...For one, this would not satisfy the condition that we be between wisdom and ignorance (and recognize that we are lacking).

Flash forward to the 1950s (in America and Britain) and the style of philosophy instruction almost always includes a bit about how you can't trust that what you see (touch, smell, etc.) is real. If I am a normal philosophy professor (I'm not), then I would think it necessary to steer the normal philosophy student (you?) from the usual trust we have in what we see, etc., in our normal affairs. That is to say, that it is very unwise to practice skepticism while driving down the freeway, and you probably don't because you are simply in another groove altogether. So the philosophy professor has to break you of this habit and introduce you to the wonderful world of skepticism. However, there's a philosopher who notices that something is truly odd about this normal mode of philosophy and philosophy-instruction. We don't seem to be able to turn it off. Enter Hilary Putnam. He calls attention to the dominance of what he calls the world-word correlation in Anglo-philosophical circles. That is to say, once you can no longer state with confidence that "I see the desk" is a good reason to believe the desk is actually in the classroom, then the words "The desk is in the classroom" are divided from the actual state of affairs in the "real, external" world. [Please refer to the attachment for more Putnam.]

We are a long way from the Symposium where the body (its capacity to sense and desire) is absolutely central to being able to know anything. What has taken over, you might say, is a skewed version of Plato ("Platonism") in which Plato has been reduced to an emphasis on the realm of the intellect as more real than the realm of the senses. Notice how faithfully Descartes channels this emphasis on the intellect when the world goes to the discard pile by the second meditation!

Part of Putnam's complaint is that we seem to be doomed to repeating the skeptical legacy of Descartes ("Cartesianism") without being able to reflect upon how we got that way. Putnam compares our mental habit of the world-word correlation to a neurotic symptom! Part of what was faithfully passed on from Descartes, it seems, was the de-emphasis on the relevance of history. As we remember reading in the Discourse, it is Descartes opinion that a preoccupation with history takes our eye off the ball (or as he says it, if we travel too much we become strangers in our own country).

So why should you care? Take this as a lesson in self-defense should you take a philosophy class elsewhere in the future and a professor tries to convince you that proper philosophical thinking requires that we withhold assent from our senses. You now know a good bit of history as to where this whole sense of philosophical business-as-usual comes from!