Insight and Inference: Descartes's Founding Principle and Modern Philosophy

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He
is the author of Competition in Religious Life, Religion vs. Television:
Competitors in Cultural Context, and Inauthentic Culture and Its
Philosophical Critics.

This academic study by Brock University philosopher Murray Miles is a
lengthy contribution to the voluminous scholarly literature on René
Descartes (1596–1650), the “father of modern philosophy.” Its
primary focus is ostensibly on Descartes’s foundational principle
cogito, ergo sum (“I am thinking, therefore I exist”), but Miles
discourses on a broad range of metaphysical, epistemological, and
historical issues regarding Descartes’s philosophy and its relation to
earlier and later philosophical systems and methodologies. Critical of
what he regards as the standard view of Cartesianism (particularly among
English-language philosophers), Miles argues that Descartes’s famous
dualism is essentially a type of metaphysical realism that inverts the
order of knowing and the order of being of the Aristotelian–Scholastic
realism to which it is proposed as an alternative. Miles draws on the
views of numerous commentators on Descartes from the 17th century to the
present time, but has a special interest in the relevance of the
insights of Husserl and Heidegger. This erudite but somewhat long-winded
study contains 139 pages of endnotes and will be helpful mainly to those
students of Descartes’s philosophy who are interested in the relation
of Cartesianism to either medieval Scholasticism or 20th-century
phenomenology. Compared to many other commentators, Miles has relatively
little interest in Descartes’s importance in (and for) the history of
science or the history of liberal religion.

Even scholars who regard Miles’s approach as one-dimensional will
find some interesting historical and philosophical suggestions in this
work. Though the book is integrated by its focus on a few themes, it can
be profitably consulted by students of Descartes interested in any
number of traditional topics of discussion. Still, the book is not a
satisfactory introduction to Descartes’s philosophy, partly because of
its often unnecessarily technical manner of expression, which contrasts
jarringly with Descartes’s own elegantly unpretentious philosophical
prose—a monumental and justly respected reflection of this great
French author’s fervent commitment to the critical importance of clear
and distinct ideas. And while Miles usefully observes in places how
commentators have frequently misunderstood the historical context of
Descartes’s project, Miles’s own interpretations are often
conspicuously anachronistic.