Abstract
In this chapter, I analyze a contemporary debate concerning a central aspect of Descartes’s Meditations. The debate concerns the proper way to respond to the question “Who is the Cartesian meditator?” The answers offered by Descartes’s commentators have included (1) a philosophically naive person of common sense, (2) a skeptic, (3) a Scholastic, and (4) an amalgam of such personas. I argue that each of these answers is misguided and that the proper response is not to attempt to answer the question. Rather, I contend, the proper response is to reject the question both because it falsely implies that the meditator is a fictional character and because reading the Meditations as a work of fiction obscures Descartes’s concern with the pursuit of virtue, in general, and with the virtues of belief formation, in particular.
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