Radical Scepticism

8.1 Cartesian foundations: the role of doubt—The assumption of the ego cogito as minimal evidence—Why our faculties, including the sensitive one, can be reduced to mental faculties—Descartes’ goal: justifying the internal experience through an external order—God’s qualities: significance of existence—Difference between “formal reality” and “objective reality”. 8.2 Descartes on essentiality and existentiality—The scholastic tradition: in what way can there be in generated beings a “metaphysical distinction and composition between essence and existence”?—Beyond the mere impossibility of self-generation: actuality as non-essential—Two ways of looking at compositionality—Heidegger’s view of the problem. 8.3 Ontic and ontological statuses—The kind of existence we attribute—Physical and metaphysical worlds: why the seeming materiality of things is not enough to objectify them—Descartes on dreaming: its context-saturation—Modal uncertainty as unrestricted: analogy with astrophysical black holes—Imagination and necessitation—Flaws of Descartes’ conclusions—Sosa’s understanding of dreaming—Greco and Williams on Cartesian contextualism—The trouble with bringing formality and objectivity back together.