Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

180 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
been tantamount to the algebraic construal of logic, something which is
constitutive of modern logic. But Descartes did not even contemplate such a
move, not because of the level of abstraction involved, which would not have
worried him if his work in mathematics is any guide, but because he was unable
to see any point in deductive inference.
CONCLUSION
Descartes’s approach to philosophical questions of method was extremely
influential from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and it replaced
Aristotelianism very quickly. It was part of a general anti-deductivist movement,
whether this took the form of a defence of hypotheses (in the seventeenth
century) or of induction (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). This
influence was transmitted indirectly through Locke, however, and with the
interpretation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy in terms of two
opposed schools of thought, rationalism and empiricism, this aspect of
Descartes’s thought tended to become forgotten, and his more programmatic
statements about his system were taken out of context and an apriorist and
deductivist methodology ascribed to him. The irony in this is that Descartes not
only vehemently rejected such an approach, but his rejection goes too far. It
effectively rules out deduction having any epistemic value, and this is something
he not only could not establish but which, if true, would have completely
undermined his own Principles of Philosophy. But this is not a simple oversight
on Descartes’s part. It reflects a serious and especially intractable problem, or
rather set of problems, about how deductive inference can be informative, which
Descartes was never able to resolve and which had deep ramifications for his
account of method.
NOTES
1 This is, at least, the usual view. For a dissenting view see G.Canguilhem, La
formation du concept de réflexe an XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, Presses
Universitaires de France, 1955), pp. 27–57.
2 (Nottingham [5.10], 30.
3 On the issue of rationalism versus empiricism see Louis E.Loeb, From Descartes to
Hume: Continental Metaphysics and the Development of Modern Philosophy
(Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1981), ch. 1.
4 [5.1], vol. 8 (1), 78–9.
5 See L.Laudan, Science and Hypothesis (Dordrecht, Reidel, 1981), ch. 4.
6 Rule 10, [5.1], vol. 10, 406.
7 [5.1], vol. 10, 376–7.
8 See Jonathan Barnes, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration’, in J.Barnes, M.
Schofield, and R.Sorabji (eds) Articles on Aristotle, vol. 1, Science (London,
Duckworth, 1975), pp. 65–87.