ABSTRACT
Descartes expands on the complaint, providing first a loving apology for humanistic learning and then a detailed assassination of the curriculum. Few modern readers of the text would notice anything worthy of a pause. But for Descartes’ readers, this passage betrays an epochal shift in the conception of knowledge. It is one on which the Scientific Revolution and the contemporary framework of knowledge all depend. Up until the time of Descartes and indeed beyond, anyone with a claim to familiarity with philosophy would have known of the teachings of Socrates. Even Francis Bacon, who had come earlier and did not follow the geometrical way, showed signs of the same crisis of confidence in inherited learning as a defense against error and ignorance. The scientific revolutionaries were far from being the first to dismiss the knowledge of the learned, but there was a new element in their consciousness which made it difficult for them to include ignorance in their perspective.
