Sobrinho’s scientific contributions

In his masterwork De La Sagesse, Pierre Charron systematizes a skeptical epistemology which configures the background and the central target of modern skepticism: the criterion of evidence. The Charronian epistemology develops basic concepts that will be used in the Rules for de Direction of the Mind and incorporated in the Discourse on the Method as crucial elements to the formulation of Cartesian cogito. The scope of this work is to explain the connection of capital ideas which composes the Rules for de Direction of the Mind with the systematized skeptical epistemology in De La Sagesse and to highlight the links that allow the inference that the Cartesian criterion of evidence is primarily a Charronian concept.

In the dialogue that dramatizes Socrates’ last philosophical discussion and words, Plato borrows a stock of images which were shaped on the Greek mystery cults’ mind sets in order to introduce the fundamental principles of his own Philosophy. His philosophic interlocutors, who represent a Pythagorean tradition, present the opportunity of a sophisticated argumentation that promotes an extreme inflection on the religious tradition and philosophical notions, which investigates the causal principles of all things. This study relies on the technical meaning of initiation, soul-harmony and Socrates’ last words: an invitation of initiation to the principle.

The question of knowledge, in Plato, represents a radical inflection towards the investigation taken by presocratics philosophers. The hypothesis of the intelligible Forms starts a philosophical procedure based on principles of intelligibility previous to phenomena wich articulate an explanatory principle of economy valid for all around the kósmos. The fundamental postulate that establish the preexistence of an accurate number of principles related to physis, allows Plato to base the ethical phenomena from his new epistemology which is founded on axiomatic causality of Forms.