ABSTRACT
An important link between the overcoming of doubt and the conception of the object of knowledge has already been noted. In the Second Responses Descartes argues that once doubt is overcome and real belief is established then ‘there is nothing more to look for…’. The postulation of this closure, an epistemological finitude, has to raise the question of what is involved in the expression ‘nothing more’. What is expressed? Any answer to this question must involve having to address the ontology of the object-the implicit ontology within Descartes’ own formulation-because it is the implicit and structuring presence of this ontology that sustains the ‘nothing more’. (Here object is used in a general sense in that it concerns the mode of being proper to the object of knowledge within epistemological finitude.)
In the Discourse on Method Descartes, in a description of the use he made of method, identifies the relationship between truth and the object in the following terms:
there being only one truth of each thing (de chaque chose) whoever finds it knows as much about it as can be known about it (on en peut savoir).
