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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Aristotelian Perspectives For Post-modern Reason (i) Modern Age and Actual Age: from the search for certainty to fallibilism Among the characteristics of modern thought is the predilection for certainty[^4] . The search for certainty has been one of the signs of identity of a whole intellectual tradition, of what Husserl[^5] calls ‘European science’.

According to Husserl, the abandonment of this search steeps us in crisis, in scepticism or in any type of naturalism. However, as Kolakowski[^6] rightly observes, neither Descartes nor Husserl managed to distinguish between the subjective feeling of evidence and the objective evidence of truth.

Consequently, in many of the modern philosophical traditions, the pursuit of certainty has become a threat to the pursuit of truth, an impulse towards different types of idealism and a cause of crisis (by inference and by reaction) rather than an antidote to it. The pursuit of certainty - infallibilism , in the words of Laudan - is one of the legacies of Cartesian philosophy.

One could state, as Clarke does, that Cartesian science is defined in terms of certainty rather than in terms of the truth of the explanations proposed.[^7] A text in which Decartes himself sets this point out clearly is: ‘What can it matter to us for something to be absolutely false if anyway we believe it and we do not have the slightest suspicion that it is false?’[^8] Or, if a negative formulation is required, ‘any knowledge that can be rendered doubtful must not be called scientific’[^9] and ‘I treat [...] as false everything which is merely likely’[^10] These words give the tone of what would from then on be the object of the quest for the scientific method.

It is, in any event, a question of establishing methods whose results will be certain knowledge, methods which we can only trust, whether or not subjective certainty is accompanied by objective truth. Francis Bacon initiated another route of access to certainty, this time with an empirical and inductive character. According to Bacon, the inductive method is the art of invention and machine , as well as formula , clear and radiant light [^11] , and other similar boons.

Those of Bacon’s ideas with the greatest influence on subsequent scientific thought are those which he expressed in his second book of the Novum Organum , that is his inductive logic, the so-called Baconian method.