ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes approaches the cogito without trust in the commonsense world of perception and belief. Descartes’s solitary vocation, whether as architect or as traveller, merely serves to heighten his anxieties about the security of his foundations and his steps along the right road to certainty. Having questioned the common practice of building roads and houses, everything sinks into the shifting sands of opinion, and the Cartesian cogito becomes the butt of the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin’s parody on its fear of sliding foundations. Descartes, then, means to conduct an assault on himself, to attack the common man in himself with the agile arguments of the philosopher he has become through espousing doubt. Yet, rather than leave things under the shadow of universal doubt and suspicion, Descartes resolves ‘to begin afresh from the foundations’, ‘to establish something firm and constant in the sciences’.
