Cartesian Immaterialism

Descartes’s procedure of sustained radical doubt about all sensory experience in his first two Meditations, culminating in the famous evil demon argument, results in his famous foregrounding of subjectivity as the basic and certain datum of metaphysics that could defeat skepticism and upon which the rest of his metaphysics can be rebuilt. Descartes’s metaphysics could have been developed idealistically and given the impetus to later idealisms – the ‘weak claim’ for Cartesian immaterialism. Hibbs, in a recent article defending the possibility of pre-Cartesian idealism, notes that Berkeleyan idealism makes some quite specific ontological claims that pick it out as a variety of idealism but that these claims should not be made to constrain which positions can be classed as idealist in general.