Descartes, skepticism, and Bouwsma

Our reading of the Meditations suggests that Descartes's intellectually courageous strategy for refuting skepticsm ultimately fails. He begins by giving skepticism everything it could ask for, up to and including an evil genius, and then attempts to refute it through the application of clear and distinct reasoning to the cogito, the necessary existence of God, and the consequent knowability of the material world. The cogito is his Archimedean point, and God serves as lever by means of which he thinks he can, with care and difficulty, know the world. As we have seen, however, clarity and distinctness are slipperier than they appear, the arguments for God are dubious at best, and the skeptic is far from vanquished. Moreover, along the way Descartes's method yields an invidious and unsustainable metaphysical distinction between mind and body, of which we are justly skeptical.

So has the skeptic won the day? It seems that if like Descartes we grant the skeptic the most extreme hypothetical possibilities for being misled, including an evil genius, we forfeit the possibility of knowledge (whether apodictically certain or even probable). But is such an evil genius actually conceivable? Bouwsma tells a compelling story about why it is not, that the skeptic is not entitled to worry about global deception by an all-powerful deceiver, even as an abstract possibility. If Bouwsma is correct, then Descartes need not have yielded so much ground to the skeptic in the first place.