"One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another"
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Nothing flatters the human mind quite like believing it’s original; Descartes quietly kneecaps that vanity. The line has the dry amusement of someone who’s watched centuries of thinkers build elaborate castles in the air, only to discover the blueprints were already filed. It’s not anti-philosophy so much as anti-credulity: if the history of thought contains every imaginable oddity, then strangeness is not a credential. Novelty proves nothing.
The intent is methodological. Descartes is writing in an era when scholastic authority still loomed and “philosophy” often meant inherited jargon fortified by reverence. His project was to rebuild knowledge on clearer foundations, and this sentence functions like a warning label: the marketplace of ideas is already stocked with weird products. Some are brilliant, some are nonsense, and many are indistinguishable unless you demand proof.
The subtext is a mathematician’s impatience with rhetorical ingenuity. Philosophy, unmoored from rigorous demonstration, can generate endless “implausible” propositions the way language can generate endless sentences. That’s not creativity; it’s combinatorics. The jab also anticipates a modern problem: the seductive confusion of “I’ve never heard that before” with “that must be true,” a bias that keeps conspiracy theories and grand systems humming.
Context matters: Descartes is the guy who introduces radical doubt not to luxuriate in skepticism, but to escape it. By reminding us that someone has already said every strange thing imaginable, he clears the stage for what he really trusts: method, clarity, and reasons that survive contact with reality.
The intent is methodological. Descartes is writing in an era when scholastic authority still loomed and “philosophy” often meant inherited jargon fortified by reverence. His project was to rebuild knowledge on clearer foundations, and this sentence functions like a warning label: the marketplace of ideas is already stocked with weird products. Some are brilliant, some are nonsense, and many are indistinguishable unless you demand proof.
The subtext is a mathematician’s impatience with rhetorical ingenuity. Philosophy, unmoored from rigorous demonstration, can generate endless “implausible” propositions the way language can generate endless sentences. That’s not creativity; it’s combinatorics. The jab also anticipates a modern problem: the seductive confusion of “I’ve never heard that before” with “that must be true,” a bias that keeps conspiracy theories and grand systems humming.
Context matters: Descartes is the guy who introduces radical doubt not to luxuriate in skepticism, but to escape it. By reminding us that someone has already said every strange thing imaginable, he clears the stage for what he really trusts: method, clarity, and reasons that survive contact with reality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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