Introduction

In “Idealism and Greek Philosophy,” Myles Burnyeat asks two questions:

1. How did it come about that philosophy accepted the idea that truth can be obtained without going outside subjective experience?

2. When and why did philosophers first lay claim to knowledge of their own subjective states?

Burnyeat argues that “it is Descartes who holds the answers to [these two] questions.” The ancients, he alleges, do not view the subjective as a realm about which there are truths. Correspondingly, neither do they view it as a realm about which there is or might be knowledge; for knowledge (both in fact and according to the ancients) implies truth. Nor, Burnyeat argues, do the ancients view the subjective as a realm about which there are or could be beliefs. As he puts it in “Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism?”:

In Meditation Two, by contrast, Descartes “discovers … the truth of statements describing the subjective states involved in the process of doubt itself”; “[s]ubjective truth has arrived to stay, constituting one's own experience as an object for description like any other.”