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How does try to extricate himself from the sceptical doubts that he has raised? Does he succeed? by Tom Nuttall [All page references and quotations from the Meditations are taken from the 1995 Everyman edition] In the Meditations, Descartes embarks upon what Ber ....

Middle of Essay
.... during his time at the Jesuit college La Flech_ and it had an important influence on his work, as we shall see later. The second was the scepticism that had made a sudden impact on the intellectual world, mainly as a reaction to the scholastic outlook. This scepticism was strongly influenced by the work of the Pyrrhonians as handed down from antiquity by Sextus Empiricus, which claimed that, as there is never a reason to believe p that is better than a reason not to believe p, we should forget about trying to discover the nature of reality and live by appearance alone. This attitude was best exemplified in the work of Michel de Montaigne, who m ....