Quotation
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“I will suppose that some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.”
René Descartes · Rationalism · Early modern · 1641
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the demon as a device that raises the doubt to its maximum, so that even simple truths of arithmetic are not allowed to pass on habit. It is a supposition, adopted for the inquiry, not a belief he adds to his religion. A rival reading treats the page as a confession of terror, or as a proof that scepticism cannot be answered, but the Meditations are built to answer this very supposition. The demon appears at the end of the First Meditation, after the dream argument has already unsettled the senses.
Did René Descartes really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Cottingham's translation of the First Meditation, Adam and Tannery volume seven, page 22. The demon is a methodological supposition, not a report that such a being exists. This wording is a translation.
Where it comes from
Meditations I (AT VII 22)
Approximate date: 1641.
How to use it
A person checking a bank balance in a cafe in Oxford can imagine a perfectly consistent fraud and still have to decide whether that imagining is a reason to trust nothing, including the cup on the table. Descartes thinks the imagining is useful once, as a purge of hasty assent, and disastrous as a way of life. The provisional rules of the Discourse exist because inquiry at this pitch cannot be the policy for crossing the street.
A mindset reading
The demon is often enjoyed as a permanent mood, a cleverness that never lets a claim stand. He introduces it in order to find what, if anything, survives it. Keeping the demon and discarding the rest of the book is a different philosophy from the one that hired the demon; A rival, opposite misuse treats the device as a joke and never feels the force of the doubt it is designed to produce.
Understand the philosophy
The key term is the malicious demon, a being of supreme power devoted to deception, stronger than the earlier appeal to a good God who might allow error. The First Meditation uses it to suspend assent. The Third and Fourth will argue about God and about error in ways that are meant to retire the hypothesis. Cottingham's English keeps the deliberateness of the supposition: he will suppose it, for the sake of the method.
- knowledge
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the demon as a device that raises the doubt to its maximum, so that even simple truths of arithmetic are not allowed to pass on habit. It is a supposition, adopted for the inquiry, not a belief he adds to his religion. A rival reading treats the page as a confession of terror, or as a proof that scepticism cannot be answered, but the Meditations are built to answer this very supposition. The demon appears at the end of the First Meditation, after the dream argument has already unsettled the senses.
Did René Descartes really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Cottingham's translation of the First Meditation, Adam and Tannery volume seven, page 22. The demon is a methodological supposition, not a report that such a being exists. This wording is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Meditations I (AT VII 22) Approximate date: 1641.