The Proof of the External World: Cartesian Theism and the Possibility of Knowledge. By STEVEN M. DUNCAN.

Abstract

According to the opening sentence of his preface, ‘Descartes’ first Meditation was the first philosophical text’ that Steven Duncan ‘ever read’ and he credits it ‘more than anything else, with making a philosopher out of me’ (p. vii). In this work, in which he acknowledges the influence of Austin Farrer's ideas upon his understanding of Descartes (cf. p. 55), Duncan aims ‘to reconstruct the project of the Meditations’ by placing their author ‘squarely in the medieval itineram mentis tradition pioneered by Augustine’, thereby hoping ‘to complete Descartes’ project by establishing’ that each of us has ‘a clear and distinct innate idea of God as a perfect being’. This latter claim is held to be essential for a successful response to the issues raised by the Cartesian philosophical method of radical doubt with its hypothetical threat of an evil genius that undermines the trustworthiness of our understanding. This is because the idea of God as so apprehended provides the basis for the Cartesian proofs of God's existence (while simultaneously rendering such arguments for theism ‘largely superfluous’) and consequently for establishing the reliability of our clear and distinct ideas and of our knowledge of ‘the existence of the external world’ (p. ix).