ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy in a spirit of questioning. In Descartes's time, modern science was making a number of empirical discoveries that disproved earlier traditional conceptions of the world. Most philosophers before Descartes, both ancient and medieval, had thought that metaphysical question—questions about the nature of being—come first. They also thought that epistemology depends on metaphysics. Epistemology became slightly more prominent with the Renaissance revival of ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism, which scrutinizes knowledge claims to reveal their flaws. In Meditations, Descartes aims to dispel both skepticism and dogmatism, thus overcoming the refusal by his contemporaries to accept the new scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of the challenges they posed to traditional beliefs. For Descartes, posing such epistemological questions was crucial to his attempt to set all knowledge, and especially the controversial knowledge he thought he had achieved regarding physics, on the solid ground of certainty.
