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How does try to extricate himself from the sceptical doubts that he has raised? Does he succeed? by Tom Nuttall [All page references and quotations from the Meditations are taken from the 1995 Everyman edition] In the Meditations, Descartes e ....

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... was what remained of the mediaeval scholastic philosophy, largely based on Aristotelian science and Christian theology. Descartes had been taught according to this outlook during his time at the Jesuit college La Flech_ and it had an important influence on his work, as we shall see later. The second was the scepticism that had made a sudden impact on the intellectual world, mainly as a reaction to the scholastic outlook. This scepticism was strongly influenced by the work of the Pyrrhonians as handed down from antiquity by Sextus Empiricus, which claimed that, as there is never a reason to believe p that is better than a reason not to b ...