Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
Silencing the Demon's AdvocateThe Strategy of Descartes' Meditations$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
Silencing the Demon's Advocate: The Strategy of Descartes' Meditations

Ronald Rubin

Print publication date: 2008

Print ISBN-13: 9780804758161

Published to Stanford Scholarship Online: June 2013

DOI: 10.11126/stanford/9780804758161.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM STANFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.stanford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Stanford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in SSO for personal use.date: 19 September 2021

Certainty and Stability

Certainty and Stability

Chapter:
(p.24) Chapter 2 Certainty and Stability
Source:
Silencing the Demon's Advocate
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
DOI:10.11126/stanford/9780804758161.003.0002

This chapter examines Rene Descartes' views on certainty and stability based on his Meditations. It analyzes the connection between perfect certainty and perfect stability, and argues that Descartes strove for certainty, not as an end in itself, but as a means to stability of belief. The chapter also contends that Descartes searched for certainty in order to avoid the intellectual turmoil of the sort which plagued Europe during his lifetime.

Keywords:   certainty, stability, Rene Descartes, belief, intellectual turmoil, Europe

Stanford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.