Methodical Doubt

Her şeyden şüphe et, şüphe edilebilecek ne varsa. Geriye kalan kesindir. Descartes dünyayı soyarak düşünen benliği buldu.

Descartes decided to doubt everything he could possibly doubt — not out of despair, but as a method. The senses deceive. Dreams feel real. An evil demon might construct the entire world as an illusion. One by one, he dismantled the furniture of ordinary knowledge until almost nothing was left standing. What survived was this: something is doing the doubting. The act of thinking proves the thinker exists. Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. Montaigne had lived with uncertainty more comfortably, treating skepticism as a disposition rather than a puzzle to solve. Descartes wanted certainty and used doubt as the instrument for finding it. The method changed philosophy by making the thinking subject the starting point for all knowledge rather than the world, God, or received tradition. Philosophers have been arguing about whether that was a good move ever since.