It is difficult to determine the place of experience in Descartes’ philosophy and science. His a priori, rationalist metaphysics would seem, on the face of it, difficult to reconcile with the explicit appeal he makes to sensory evidence in both his scientific practice and methodological remarks. Although earlier descriptions of Descartes as a pure a priorist in natural science (e.g., Koyré 1978, pp. 89-94) have rightly been rejected, it would be a mistake to embrace the other extreme, as does Clarke (1982), with his bold revisionist thesis that Descartes was, in actuality, an empiricist. And yet the possibility of combining the rationalist and empiricist elements in Descartes’ thought has also seemed problematic, for it has been assumed that Descartes required that experientially based knowledge meet the standard of absolute certainty set by the the method of doubt in the First Meditation (Garber 1978).
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