I said above that the notion of persuasion is not antithetical to the rational or evidential; it simply puts the rational and evidential in their proper context. In Descartes’s philosophical method, he sought to doubt everything that it was possible to doubt in order to arrive at some indubitable truth (he likely took this basic method from Augustine). As Descartes began to doubt everything, he recognized that there is one thing that he could not doubt: that he was doubting. And if he was doubting, then he was thinking. The supposed indubitable that Descartes adopted was his now famous dictum
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