Abstract

"How does it follow, from the fact that I am aware of nothing else but thinking as belonging to my essence, that nothing else does in fact belong to it?" This was the crucial question that struck contemporary readers of the Discourse, and which Descartes promised to answer more satisfactorily in the Meditations. Peter Markie's painstaking book is devoted to finding a plausible defense for Descartes on this trickiest of issues--the "gambit" of the title being precisely the disputed move from knowledge to essence: "Descartes' gambit is to deduce his theory of the self from premises about his self-knowledge". Markie discusses and rejects the two most widely canvassed interpretations of Descartes' strategy--the "Clear and Distinct Perception Defense", and the "Epistemic Criterion Defense". Instead, Markie suggests that Descartes moves "from premises about his epistemic state to conclusions about his essence by intermediate results about what is logically possible".