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Scholars of medieval Jewish exegesis have devoted considerable energy to various matters of content. This chapter describes a structural model and exegetical technique widely associated with Isaac Abarbanel and Isaac Arama, who flourished at the end of the 15th century. It raises a series of “doubts”, “questions”, or “difficulties”, which are resolved in the ensuing exegetical treatment. This hermeneutical technique is referred to as the “method of doubts”. The origins of this form in Jewish literature, its prevalence in the generation of the expulsion, and the cultural significance of this phenomenon have yet to be analyzed. Three related genres of Jewish writing are considered: biblical exegesis, sermons, and discursive philosophical texts. Some examples of a similar form in the same genres of Christian writing from antiquity and the Middle Ages are given. The challenge will be to see where these two traditions might meet. Finally, the chapter analyzes the cultural significance of this exegetical mode, which is called the “problematizing” of the Hebrew Bible by the exegete.

Second Philosophy is introduced as the theorizing of a particular sort of naturalistic inquirer, the Second Philosopher. Unlike other naturalists, she doesn't reject Descartes's Method of Doubt as ‘unscientific’; she takes him at his word that it will provide a way of improving and correcting her understanding of the world. Her disagreement comes in the implementation, where she thinks he hasn't provided good reasons for his claims.

This chapter summarizes the key points in the First Meditation, and raises the question of whether or not the arguments set forth are self-refuting. The first two—the Deceptiveness of the Senses Argument and the Dream Argument—question the fallibility of sense perception in determining the unshakable truth. The third argument, the Deceiver Hypothesis, cannot self-refute because its arguments are not built on the senses at all. These illustrate Descartes's “quest for certainty [of belief]” by first establishing the groundwork of his method of doubt.

Descartes implements his Method of Doubt by means of his dreaming and Evil Demon hypotheses. The commonsense philosopher and the scientific naturalist are willing to try the Method, given the benefits Descartes advertises, but in the end, they abandon it as failing to live up to its billing and return to their ordinary methods unperturbed. In contrast, Stroud sees the Dream Argument as issuing a direct skeptical challenge to those ordinary methods. His case for this rests on an unnoticed shift from ordinary dreaming to an extraordinary form of dreaming (essentially the Evil Demon hypothesis). Furthermore, his engagement with Austin’s ordinary language treatment of ‘know’ relies on an objective ‘concept of knowledge’, which Austin himself effectively rejects. In fact, Austin isn’t out to analyze any concept but to illuminate the subtlety and effectiveness of our ordinary use of ‘know’, which leaves the skeptic’s far less useful usage without motivation.

Descartes is a virtue epistemologist. Not only does he distinguish centrally between animal and reflective knowledge - in his terms, between cognitio and scientia - but in additionhe conceives of cognitio as apt grasp of the truth: i.e. as grasp whose correctness manifests sufficient epistemic competence. First-order knowledge is such cognitio or apt belief, which can then be upgraded to the level of scientia through competent reflective endorsement. So Descartes both (a) advocates aptness as an account of simple knowledge, and (b) highlights a higher knowledge that requires endorsement from a second-order perspective. This includes both main components of a sort of ‘virtue epistemology’ found in contemporary philosophy. This chapter argues that we can make sense of Descartes’s epistemological project only as a second-order project that fits with the view of his epistemology just sketched. Along the way supportive detail will reveal his commitment more fully.

This chapter investigates the place and role of mental agency in suppositional reasoning and self-critical reflection. It considers Descartes’ suggestion that when one is engaged in these activities, which are the essential elements of Descartes’ method of doubt, ‘the mind uses its own freedom’. The chapter considers similar proposals made by O’Shaughnessy and Korsgaard. The chapter articulates what is right in these proposals, and in identifying where we should locate the role of mental agency in these forms of conscious reasoning it provides a critique of Galen Strawson's proposal that the role of mental action in thinking and reasoning can at best be ‘merely catalytic’ and ‘indirect’.

This chapter contains selected letters from the correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, and the Cambridge Platonist and philosopher-theologian Henry More. The letters span the period from 1650 to 1653 and are mainly focused on ideas in René Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy and More’s Philosophicall Poems. Their exchange covers such topics as the ontological argument for the existence of God, the Cartesian method of doubt, Cartesian cosmology, and the nature of soul and body. The letters show Conway engaging in critical appraisals of both More and Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions. The chapter begins with an introductory essay by the editor, situating the correspondence in the context of More’s and Conway’s mature philosophical views. It is argued that these letters foreshadow Conway’s later interest in issues to do with the nature of substance and God. The correspondence includes editorial annotations, to assist the reader’s understanding of early modern terms and ideas.