ABSTRACT
Michel de Montaigne’s doubt is a sceptical doubt. Descartes responds to Montaigne by converting this doubt, which was a type of anthropological attitude and an exercise reformulated from the quaestio, into a criterion for finding new types of evidence based on clarity and distinction. Descartes’ task was to turn the quaestio into a path that leads from the particular to the universal. To summarize, Descartes seems to have had a congenital problem between his manner of conceiving knowledge and his manner of practicing knowledge. In Descartes’ investigations into the new science, there is a change in the status of the relationship between the subject and the truth. From Descartes on, the being of the subject need not go through any experience or even through any preparation to encounter the conditions for verifying the truth. Descartes represents the point of transition from the madman as the subject of a tragic experience to the madman as the object of critical consciousness.
