The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter Quotes

“Descartes was not interested in probabilities. He wanted absolute certainty. He had to be sure that indubitable knowledge, immune from skeptical attack, was possible.”
― Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes

“While some of his clerical opponents suggested that his proofs for God’s existence are so obviously bad that they must have been designed by a devious atheist to in fact undermine the belief in God’s existence, more secular-minded critics protested against Descartes’s resorting to God as a deus ex machina to solve an epistemological quandary, and they questioned the propriety of relying on matters of faith in what should be a project of rational inquiry.”
― Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes

“God could have made mountains without valleys. And God could have made it the case that a triangle has interior angles whose sum is more or less than 180 degrees,”
― Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes

“God made the world, but he also made it true that one plus one equals two. And just as he might have not made a world, so he might just as well have not made it true that one plus one equals two, or even have made it true instead that one plus one equals three. Similarly, “[God] was free to make it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal—just as free as He was not to create the world.”34”
― Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes

“When Mersenne circulated the manuscript of the Meditations among various philosophers and theologians to gather “objections,” he included the English thinker Thomas Hobbes and the French materialist Pierre Gassendi, an early modern reviver of the philosophy of Epicurus.”
― Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes