Abstract

Thomas Lennon’s book is an important contribution to Descartes scholarship in that it systematically challenges the standard interpretation of the Meditations, i.e., that Descartes sought to refute skepticism and failed, arguing instead that a notion of intellectual integrity rests at the root of Descartes’s thought. All the while, these aims are accomplished through an analysis of the Censura philosophiae cartesianae by Pierre-Daniel Huet, a skeptic and fierce critic of Descartes.Beyond introducing Huet and his relationship to Cartesians like Pierre-Sylvain Regis and Nicolas Malebranche, chapter one argues that Descartes’s apparent pride, arrogance, and vanity precipitated Huet’s conversion from supporter to avid critic of Descartes. Chapters two though seven further establish Huet’s concern with Descartes’s pride. But Lennon’s deeper aim, after arguing that the standard interpretation is a relatively late invention solidified by Richard Popkin’s The History of Scepticism, is systematically to unravel the standard interpretation by addressing the cogito, doubt, the criterion of truth, circularity, God, etc. In each