Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyof philosophy.net.

Today's episode, unclear and indistinct ideas, debating the meditations.

At the risk of divulging trade secrets and just between us, most academics don't enjoy grading exams.

Speaking for myself, it's my least favorite part of the job, admittedly a job I love and I'm

fortunate to have, what with the combination of tedium, time pressure, and the high stakes of needing

to evaluate student work fairly. Yet there are moments

of genuine pleasure involved, too, really excellent papers that stand out, or students who

manage to make me laugh out loud. I particularly cherish the memory of a batch of exams I had many

years ago, which were on early modern philosophy. One essay on Thomas Hobbes said that,

according to him, people in the state of nature were nasty, brutish, and short,

a misquotation that conjures up hordes of diminutive prehistoric thugs.

I suspect that was a slip of the pen and not a deliberate joke,

but in the same stack of papers, another student was surely going for laughs when they wrote

that Descartes was an expert in geometry which enabled him to argue in a circle. You have to give it to

Descartes, actually, a philosopher so famous and influential that even his mistakes have traditional

titles. The much-discussed Cartesian circle is a supposed flaw in the logic of the

meditations. It's a worry that was put forward by the first readers of the meditations, including

Antoine Arnold. He puts it like this. Descartes says that we are sure that whatever we perceive

clearly and evidently is true, only because God exists, but we can be sure that God

exists only because we clearly and distinctly perceive this.

Attempts to fend off the charge of circular reasoning go back just as far, with the first

attempts being offered by Descartes himself.

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