Luis Villoro and the cartesian canon of evidence

Abstract

Orthodox or canonical understanding of cartesian philosophy supposes that, as the only way to resist extreme scepticism, Descartes advocates for intrinsically indubitable grounds for knowledge claims. In his book on Descartes, Luis Villoro investigates how these desiderata could possibly be satisfied in a rigorous way. He concludes with a substantive proposal, which according to himself, is plausibly expressed by some of Descartes' theories.  These must be strictly separated from other, merely dogmatic doctrines present in the corpus. In this essay, I first subject to scrutiny the validity claim of the theory advocated by Villoro, and in a 2nd. section, starting from Villoro's analysis, argue in general against the canonical understanding of Descartes.