Just for the record: it's in fact VERY controversial among Descartes scholars whether Descartes actually committed the Cartesian circle, cf. the SEP article on Descartes' epistemology. It would indeed be very surprising if such a great philosopher had made such an elementary mistake...
Sure, and D gives other arguments for God's existence, which would then avoid any circularity. But I don't fully go for the "he couldn't have meant the circular interpretation" because *everyone* makes mistakes, and he went through far less editing that contemporary thinkers. There's a tendency, for scholars of any thinker X, to big up X too far. (See: Kantians.)
Just for the record: it's in fact VERY controversial among Descartes scholars whether Descartes actually committed the Cartesian circle, cf. the SEP article on Descartes' epistemology. It would indeed be very surprising if such a great philosopher had made such an elementary mistake...
Sure, and D gives other arguments for God's existence, which would then avoid any circularity. But I don't fully go for the "he couldn't have meant the circular interpretation" because *everyone* makes mistakes, and he went through far less editing that contemporary thinkers. There's a tendency, for scholars of any thinker X, to big up X too far. (See: Kantians.)
@@AtticPhilosophy This is big brain stuff... Thanks for summing up a lot of this for us.