The History of Why

Reading guide

2 readings

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What supports a claim to knowledge?

Reading guide · 2 readings

Knowing calls for more than feeling sure. Both readings ask what makes a belief well grounded, but they place different demands on justification, and setting them side by side is the course’s own comparison.

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Checking a source of knowledge

Nyāya examines perception, inference and testimony, and asks how a means of checking can itself be checked. On this view, ordinary trust stays open to correction.

  • Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 9

    How can we tell whether we know?

    Nyāya counts perception, inference and testimony among the ways of coming to know, and sets out an inference in five steps. How can inquiry check its own instruments without demanding certainty in advance?

Demanding a secure starting point

Descartes sets aside, for a time, the beliefs that might be false. Compare his search for certainty with Nyāya’s response when a particular belief comes into doubt.

  • Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 48

    How far can doubt take us?

    Descartes moves from deliberate doubt to the certainty that he is thinking, a starting point the lesson keeps apart from his further claims about mind and body.