Circling to Scientia: Reading Descartes in Light of the Debate Between Stoic Dogmatists and Academic Skeptics

I argue that situating Descartes’s epistemology in relation to the debate between Stoic dogmatists and Academic skeptics sheds light on his theological argument for the reliability of clear and distinct perception in the Meditations. In particular, it allows us to understand how the argument might lead to a sort of certainty in its conclusion that is properly epistemic and not merely psychological, and it enables us to see how reasoning though the argument is supposed to make scientia possible.