Abstract

This article tries to discuss some reasons why Descartes could not challenge the radical skepticism of the first meditation by appealing to the fact that a pyrrhonist shall be subject to self-refutation. First of all, we try to establish some relations between the principle of non-contradiction and the aphasia, both from the point of view of the Aristotle’s Γ book of Metaphysics and from the view of Sextus’ Outlines of Skepticism. From an account of this fundamental divergence between pyrrhonists and Aristotle, we could exhibit some elements of the de- bate between Descartes and the radical skeptic: the problem of the insufficiency of logic as a solution to the referred divergence and the search for a metaphysical principle that is an indubitable being – as Descartes argues in the letter to Clerselier on June or July 1646 – that the skeptic could not deny.

Keywords

Skepticism, Contradiction, Aphasia, Cogito, Descartes, Aristotle