In much of Anglo-American philosophy, ‘Cartesian’ is a dirty word. It is applied to a wide range of unpopular views in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, views that are loosely associated with those in the Meditations. I shall argue that many of these unpopular views are defensible in some form, and that they help to counteract the current excesses of naturalism on the one hand, and antirationalism on the other. Contrary to naturalism, not everything that can usefully be said about knowledge or the mind comes from investigating computers, the brain, or the causal interactions between the sense organs and matter, and bad things happen when philosophy is reduced to a form of popular science. Philosophy ought of course to be informed by science, but some of its problems about mind and knowledge do not go away when scientific advances are made. Innocent Cartesianism has a role in making this clear. It can sometimes consist of asserting the endurance of the old problems in the face of breezy declarations of an entirely new agenda.

Naturalism is a tendency within Anglo-American philosophy itself; the other tendency that innocent Cartesianism counteracts – antirationalism – is influential outside philosophy, at any rate Anglo-American philosophy. This tendency, too, is marked by the use of ‘Cartesian’ as a term of abuse. What it is applied to this time is not the supposed illusion of a system of truths independent of natural science but a certain myth-ridden philosophical anthropology.