Introduction

Jean de Silhon (1596–1667), a French statesman and moralist, was a friend of Descartes and of Guez de Balzac (an essayist and another of Descartes' friends). There are several references to de Silhon in Descartes' letters, Descartes asking for news of him, and there is evidence of actual correspondence between the two, although their letters do not seem to have survived, except perhaps the letter to an unknown correspondent surmised to have been de Silhon. Along with their friendship, Descartes and de Silhon shared an antiskeptical apologetic program. In his treatise, The Two Truths (1626), de Silhon combats skepticism by attempting to establish that God exists and that our souls are immortal. He revisits some of these themes in his Immortality of the Soul (1634). There he maintains that Christianity is in conformity with the natural light of our understanding. He also maintains, three years before Descartes' Discourse, that each person possesses a certain knowledge of which it is impossible that a person capable of reflection and reason can doubt and not be certain: every person can know his or her existence and being.