An imagined gathering
1640 · Paris, France
Descartes tries his new method on Pascal and Galileo, and finds that doubt is harder to teach than he expected.
Descartes is in Paris to see his Meditations through the press, and has invited the young Blaise Pascal, whose calculating machine he admires, and Galileo, passing through on his way back to Tuscany. He wants to test the method of doubt on two very different minds.
Pascal takes to it at once and immediately pushes it further than Descartes intends, asking why the doubt itself should be exempt. Galileo, trained in observation, finds the whole exercise a detour from the study of nature. They eat a raised pie, syllabub, and spiced wine, and the argument about first principles runs long past the meal.
Host: René Descartes
Blaise Pascal — Seventeen years old and already famous for a calculating machine.
Galileo Galilei — Passing through Paris and impatient with metaphysics.
Main
a period dish
First course
a period dish
Drink
a period dish
René Descartes
Descartes' method of doubting everything that can be doubted until he reaches the one certainty that he is thinking.
René Descartes
Descartes' separation of thinking substance from extended substance, and the puzzle of how the two interact.
Galileo Galilei
What Galileo saw through his improved spyglass — lunar mountains, Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus — and why it unsettled the received cosmos.
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.