Descartes’s Creation of the World: The Birth of Genetic Epistemology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.43.1.03Keywords:
Descartes, Rousseau, epistemology, genesis, mechanism, philosophy of nature, fictionAbstract
The article describes a rarely mentioned and discussed method of explication first found in Chapter six of Descartes’s posthumously published The World (Le Monde), where he uses a fictitious cosmological narrative to develop an account of our material universe and its laws. The assumption of such an approach is that the thing’s structure (nature) can be revealed by its genesis (its producibility), even if the latter is fictitious, or rather, precisely because it is fictitious. This method of “genetic epistemology” turns out to be surprisingly influential: it is found, for example, in Rousseau’s reflections on the state of nature, but also in commentaries on Descartes’s philosophy – e.g. in Martial Gueroult’s principle of “the order of reasons”.
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