Descartes
Discourse on Method – Parts One and Two

"my purpose here is not to teach the method that everyone ought to follow in order to conduct his reason well, but merely to show how I have tried to conduct my own." (2)

The Result of His Education: "I found myself confounded by so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that I had not gained any profit from my attempt to teach my self , except that more and more I had discovered my ignorance. And yet I was at one of the most renowned schools of Europe, where I thought there must be learned men, if in fact any such men existed anywhere on earth." (3)

Assessing Various Kinds of Knowledge: Mathematics: "I delighted most of all in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its reasoning." (4)

The Ancients: "I compared the writings of the ancient pagans that deal with morals to very proud and magnificent places that were built on nothing but sand and mud." (5)

Philosophy: "Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there is still nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and , and consequently nothing that is not doubtful, I was not at all so presumptuous as to hope to fare any better there than the others" (5)

 Assessing Science: "as for the other sciences, I judged that, insofar as they borrow their principles from philosophy, one could not have built anything solid upon such unstable foundations." (5)

Deferring to Religion: "I revered our theology … the revealed truths guiding us there are beyond our understanding" (5)

 Notice Descartes' desire for foundations.

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Descartes' Method

Avoid a Patchwork Approach: "there is often not so much perfection in works composed of many pieces and made by the hands of various master craftsmen as there is in those works on which but a single individual has worked." (7)

'Tearing Down the House': "one does see very well that many people tear down their own houses in order to rebuild them … as regards all the opinions to which I had until now given credence, I could not do better than to try to get rid of them once and for all, in order to replace them later on, either with other ones that are betters, or even with the same ones once I had reconciled them to the norms of reason." (8)

 4 Rules: "the following four rules would be sufficient for me, provided I made a firm and constant resolution not even once to fail to observe them" (11)
  (1) "never … accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such"
(2) "divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible and as was required in order better to resolve them."
(3) "conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, by commencing with those objects that are simplest and easiest to know"
(4) "make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I was assured of having omitted nothing." (11) ***********

The Goal: "Those long chains of utterly simple and easy reasonings that geometers commonly used to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations had given me occasion to imagine that all the things that can fall within human knowledge follow from one another in the same way, and that, provided only that one abstain from accepting any of them as true that is not true, and that one always adheres to the order one must follow in deducing the ones from the others, there cannot be any that are not so remote that they are not eventually reached nor so hidden that they are not discovered." (11)

The Method:  Cartesian Foundationalism   -start from certain foundations
-proceed only by certain (i.e., deductive) reasoning [Philosophy 1200]