Dogmatism

To answer skepticism it is not enough to pile up probable opinions: a truth is needed that no argument can shake. Descartes makes this his strategy, pushing hyperbolic doubt as far as the hypothesis of the evil demon so as to keep only what survives it: the very act of thinking, which outlasts every possible doubt. Once that rock is found, the task is to propagate its certainty to the rest of knowledge, and the model for this is geometry: ordering knowledge more geometrico, from self-evident axioms to their necessary consequences, as Spinoza deduces the Ethics in the manner of the geometers. The certainty aimed at is not a psychological assurance but the compelling self-evidence of demonstration.

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II · Spinoza, Ethics, opening of Part I

Against sophistic relativism, Platonism holds that a true science, epistēmē (stable scientific knowledge of the true, opposed to mere opinion, doxa), of the Forms is attainable, distinct from mere opinion. The wise can reach stable and certain knowledge of what is eternal, a markedly dogmatic stance in the classical sense.

Plato, Theaetetus, 201d-210a, knowledge and opinion · Plato, Republic, 477a-480a

Aristotelianism is dogmatic in the noble sense: genuine science, epistēmē, is demonstrative knowledge proceeding from indemonstrable first principles, themselves grasped with certainty by the intellect. Scientific knowledge bears on the necessary and the universal, which excludes sceptical doubt about its foundations, even as practical wisdom acknowledges the inherent uncertainty of the domain of action.

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I, 2 and II, 19

Against the skepticism of the New Academy, the Stoics are dogmatists: they hold that certain knowledge is possible through the kataleptic impression, an impression so clear and distinct that it grasps its object and can come only from what is real. It is the criterion of truth and the foundation of the sage's science.

Cicero, Academica · Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VII, 46

Husserlian phenomenology means to be a rigorous science, able to ground knowledge against psychologism and skeptical relativism. Its gesture is the epoché: suspending the naive thesis of the world in order to return to the things themselves, as they give themselves to consciousness. There lie apodictic data, indubitable because grasped without intermediary in intuitive self-evidence, the bedrock of a certain knowledge. This quest for an absolute foundation brings Husserl close to a Cartesian-inspired foundationalism, even if his heirs, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, will abandon that ideal of apodicticity.

Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science · Husserl, Cartesian Meditations

Two principles govern all knowledge: that of contradiction, which rules necessary truths, and that of sufficient reason, by which nothing is true without a reason why it is so rather than otherwise. If every truth has its reason, then every truth is in principle analyzable and demonstrable: this is the ground of Leibniz's rationalist dogmatism, which pushes the idea to its limit by dreaming of a characteristica universalis, a universal language of concepts, and a calculus ratiocinator in which disagreements would be resolved by reckoning, as between two accountants. Certainty is no longer a distant ideal but the assignable terminus of a regulated procedure.

On the Method of Universality; letters on the characteristica universalis · Monadology, §31-32 (principles of contradiction and of sufficient reason)

The Ethics is demonstrated more geometrico, in the manner of the geometers: definitions, axioms, propositions and proofs. This deductive architecture attests a rationalist dogmatism, the conviction that true and certain knowledge of the whole of reality is attainable.

Ethics (full title: Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order) · Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on the certainty of the true idea

Against skepticism, Descartes turns doubt against itself: he drives it to the point of hyperbole, supposing an evil genius who deceives him about everything, to see whether anything withstands it. Yet the very act of doubting presupposes a subject who doubts: I can call everything into doubt except that I am thinking, and therefore that I am. The cogito is no dogma laid down in advance but a certainty won through doubt itself, an indubitable foothold from which the whole of knowledge can be rebuilt. The conclusion is thus firmly dogmatic: full certainty is attainable, and skepticism refutes itself when pushed to its limit.

Meditations on First Philosophy, I and II · Discourse on Method, IV

Doubt and skepticism are not the last word but a moment thought passes through and integrates: the Phenomenology is the path by which consciousness rises to absolute knowing, where the object is no longer an alien in-itself but spirit itself. The system therefore attains a definitive truth, not by a dogma posited at the outset, but as the result of a course that has endured the negative. This absolute knowing is not omniscience, but the form in which the subject recognizes itself in the object.

Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. VIII (absolute knowing)

Against sophistic relativism, Plato holds, especially in the central dialogues, that stable knowledge, epistēmē, is possible: it bears on the Forms and is rigorously distinct from mere opinion, doxa, shifting and groundless. This confidence in a science of being brings him close to dogmatism, even if the interrogative form of the dialogues tempers any systematisation.

Republic, V, 476d-480a · Theaetetus, 187a-201c

Science (epistēmē) is demonstrative knowledge: a knowledge of the necessary, derived by syllogism from true, immediate first principles better known than the conclusion. This confidence in a certain, grounded knowledge places Aristotle on the side of dogmatism, tempered by his admission that the practical domain admits only an approximate exactness.

Posterior Analytics, I.2 · Nicomachean Ethics, I.3 (1094b)

Berkeley takes scepticism to be the disease to cure, and immaterialism to be its remedy. Modern doubt, he says, springs entirely from matter: once one posits real things hidden behind our ideas, one can never know whether our ideas resemble them, hence the veil of perception into which the sceptic rushes. Remove that unknowable matter, and the gap vanishes: things are no more than what we perceive, immediately and with certainty. Far from the rationalist dogmatism of Descartes, who grounds certainty on reason, Berkeley relocates it in sensible perception itself, made secure because there is no longer anything outside it to miss.

Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Preface and III · Principles of Human Knowledge, §§86-88

Against skepticism, Epicurus holds that all sensations are true: sensation, infallible because irrational and memoryless, never errs; error arises only from the judgment that opinion adds. This confidence in a secure criterion of truth is a dogmatism, even if grounded on the senses rather than reason.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, X, 31-32 (all sensations are true) · Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, IV, 469-521 (defence of the truth of the senses)

Faced with the relativism that psychologism brought to bear on logic, and the historicist scepticism of his day, Husserl sets philosophy the demand of a rigorous science: not one more opinion, but knowledge possessed of an apodictic, indubitable evidence. For this he takes up the founding move of Descartes, the search for an absolutely certain ground, but displaces it: that ground is not a thinking substance, it is the self-evidence of lived experiences themselves, given in person to the gaze that describes them. The phenomenological reduction suspends not in order to doubt, but to reach what resists all doubt, the field of consciousness as it shows itself.

Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911) · Cartesian Meditations, First Meditation

Roused from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, Kant rejects both opposing paths: dogmatic metaphysics, which claims to know the unconditioned, God, the soul, the world as a totality, loses itself in the antinomies, where reason contradicts itself; yet Humean skepticism, dissolving necessity into habit, is just as untenable. The critical path settles it: there is indeed an apodictic certainty, that of synthetic a priori judgments, but it holds only of appearances, objects as they appear to us under the forms of the subject, not of things in themselves. A necessary and universal certainty, then, but paid for with an impassable limit.

Critique of Pure Reason, Prefaces and Transcendental Dialectic · Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics