Descartes’s Faith

Felipe Gustavo Alves Moreira

doi:10.15448/1984-6746.2025.1.46579

Authors

Felipe Gustavo Alves Moreira University of Sao Paulo (USP), Sao Paulo (SP), Brazil https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7764-1231

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-6746.2025.1.46579

Keywords:

Faith, Metaphilosophy, Religion, Skepticism

Abstract

An extremely popular view among faithless persons is that persons of faith are not legitimate philosophical opponents. After all, one would be so if and only if one met a strong condition in: avoiding appeal to emotions or Scriptures, suspending judgment or seeking to convince others without using propositions of faith and respecting Pyrrhonist epistemic standards. The essay challenges this condition; it supports a weak condition according to which one is a legitimate philosophical opponent if and only if one recognizes one’s difficulty of
distinguishing emotions and reasons for taking propositions to be true, is aware of some of one’s propositions of faith and acknowledges one’s argumentative limits. While criticizing the strong condition and backing up the weak one, the essay tackles two philosophical personas: Faithless Descartes who purports but disrespects the strong condition; and Faithful Descartes who illustrates a person of faith who meets the weak condition. That is not yet an exegetical essay on Descartes. Hence, though based on his works, the stated personas are not exactly identical to Descartes’ own stance.

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Author Biography

Felipe Gustavo Alves Moreira, University of Sao Paulo (USP), Sao Paulo (SP), Brazil

Currently, Felipe G. A. Moreira is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo, where he develops research on the philosophy of logic with the support of FAPESP (Process Number 2024/13530 2). He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Miami with an interchange period financed by the DAAD at the University of Bonn. He has MAs in Philosophy from Boston College and Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He has a BA in Philosophy from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a BA in Social Communication from Federal Fluminense University with an interchange period at University of Paris X. He published varied articles. In 2022, Palgrave Macmillan (Springer) released his book, The Politics of Metaphysics. He has worked in the intersection of varied areas of philosophy, such as metaphilosophy, metaphysics, political philosophy and the philosophies of logic, language, religion and poetry. He also works as a poet, having published two collections of poems. Personal Website: https://www.felipegamoreira.com/.

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