Maybe I’m just small brained but I’ve never understood this phrase
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The context, is that before descartes, for thousands of years, there was philosophy. And philosophers worked on all sorts of questions they figured to be important, like Who are we? Why are? Are we really? What is it all for? Etc.
These methods of inquiry didn’t really produce much results. The importance of this one quote of descartes is basically the idea to simply skip over such big existential unanswerable questions and instead to focus on questions that can be solved. More approachable problems that you can observe and make hypthesises about and test. That’s the basis of what scientific method was built from.
And it’s also about questioning your beliefs. To find out anything new, you must question if what you already know is correct or not. But that scepticism has to be bounded, if you observe something, you can’t simply discard your observation by being infinitely sceptical. You can’t go oh maybe my perception of entire reality is off so the results I got are still not valid. Like it or not, your results are what they are, and you have to live with it.
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