Last year, as some of you may recall, I took it upon my chairly shoulders to solve the problem of causation, where this problem can be stated this way: What is causation?  According to the analysis I offered, C is a cause of E if and only if C makes E happen.  I am happy to report that, in the year since delivering this account of causation, no objections have arisen.  The critics have been silenced.  Indeed, my colleague Dan Hausman, the Herbert Simon Professor of Philosophy, reports that he is no longer satisfied with the view he expressed in his recent book on causation, and I have no doubt that his change of mind is due in no small part to my seminal contribution to this subject.  If you would permit me a joke, I think I “made happen” a change in Dan’s mind.   I should also mention that we are now fortunate to have amongst us Carolina Sartorio, whose own analysis of causation, arrived at independently (she  claims), seems but a stylistic variant of my own.  Where I see causes as things that make things happen, she sees them as things that make a difference.  I think, but can’t be certain, that our analyses come to the same thing.  Perhaps if she hadn’t muddied the waters with all those numbered propositions and ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’ we could settle the matter.

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            This year I would like to do for Cartesian scholarship what I earlier did for causation.  My subject is the Cartesian Circle, and I intend to show in a way that leaves no doubt – something, by the way, that figured importantly in Descartes’ epistemology – that there is in fact no circle about which Descartes has to worry.  Let us begin.

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            Circles have been around for a long time.  We know that circles existed as early as the Pleistocene period, when our ancestors drew representations of them in some caves in France.  These circles were red, and apparently hung in the sky over herds of buffalo and mastadons and brontosauruses.  Anthropologists are divided over the significance the red circles held for our fuzzy forbearers.  Some think that the circle was a primitive Frisbee and cite as evidence the fact that Frisbees remain popular today among dirty, bare-footed, and hairy human beings.  Others think the circle was worshipped for its roundness.  It is safe to say that until the circle came onto the scene, there was nothing quite so round.  It is, therefore, not entirely farfetched to suppose that our Pleistocene progenitors were so impressed with the circles’ round-u-larity that they took them as objects worthy of adulation. 

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            But I digress.  For Descartes, the circle concerns the connection between these two claims:

(1) I am certain that God exists only because I am certain of anything I clearly and distinctly perceive

(2) I  am certain of anything I clearly and distinctly perceive only because I am certain that God exists

Technically speaking, if these two claims do constitute a circle, the sum of the degrees of their angles must be equal to 360.  It is hard to know why critics of Descartes believe this to be so.  Indeed, I am sympathetic to a point that many Descartes apologists have made: that to insist on the Cartesian circle is to commit a  kind of category mistake.  What kind?  The kind where you mistake one sort of category for another.  Ryle, quite famously, made great hay of category mistakes, and then fed it to his pony.

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            Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Descartes, had a deep interest in the question of the Cartesian circle.  Unlike weaker minds like Malebranche and Gassendi, Hobbes chose to meet the threat of the circle head on.  If the circle could be squared, Hobbes reasoned, it would no longer be a circle, and hence any reason to give up on Descartes’ epistemology because of its circularity would dissolve.  Unfortunately, as John Wallis, the Savilian Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and an archrival of Hobbes, demonstrated in his paper “Squared circles, married bachelors, and flights to the moon: the absurdities of Thomas Hobbes,” circles cannot be squared.  Incidentally, Wallis was wrong about the moon flights and, in a stunning discovery reported in this month’s journal Science, it looks as though he was wrong about the married bachelors as well.

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            Say what you will, Hobbes deserves credit for trying.  With this brief history of the dispute now behind us, I would like to settle the issue once and for all.  Unlike many commentators who attempt to show that there is no Cartesian circle because there exists for Descartes some propositions that are antecedently exempt from doubt, or that can become exempt from doubt, I favor a different strategy.  I will show that even if Descartes did create a circle, the circle is not vicious. 

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            What makes a circle vicious?  Perhaps at this point we should consider the related work of one of my esteemed colleagues.  Claudia Card, the Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy, has spent a considerable amount of time on the topic of evil, and evil behavior, if I’m not mistaken, is not too far removed from vicious behavior.  If I’m remembering Professor Card’s analysis correctly, evil is something really, really, really bad.  It would follow that for something to be vicious is for it to be either not quite as really bad as evil, perhaps only really bad, or, slightly worse, really, really bad OR, alternatively, vicious things might be worse than evil things.  For example, vicious things might be really, really, really, really bad, or, if it is possible for things to get this bad, really, really, really, really, really bad. 

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            Whatever the case, we now have at our disposal the means by which to save Descartes.  In order to show that his circle is vicious, one must show that it is either really bad, really really bad, or bad to some degree n, where n > 3, for it would not do to show simply that the circle is evil.  But, I shall now suggest without trying to argue the point, Descartes’ circle is at worst an evil one and, probably on further reflection, just a bad one.  But evil circles and bad circles are not vicious circles, despite their other faults.  Thus, to his critics, including the recently deceased Johnny Cash, who characterized the Cartesian circle as a “ring of fire,” Descartes has, I think a very persuasive response.