Descartes And Descartes 's The Meditations

In Meditation Two of René Descartes’ Meditation on First Philosophy, he notes the sight of “men crossing the square.” This observation is important as Descartes states, “But what do I see aside from hats and clothes, which could easily hide automata? Yet I judge them to be men.” This is an important realization as Descartes argues that instead of purely noticing the men through sight, it is actually “solely with the faculty of judgement,” the mind, that perceives and concludes that the thing wearing a hat and clothes are men. I argue that this view of the outside world by Descartes is incomplete as his idea of “I” is faulty, as well as having a misunderstanding on the importance of the senses.

With this goal in mind, Descartes sets out his epistemological quest. In the first meditation, Descartes identifies that he must systematically rid of existing beliefs (Lightbody, Jan 24). To do so, Descartes takes a skeptic method of doubting and calls all that is claimed as knowledge into doubt. From these doubts, Descartes asserts a basis that he claims is free of presumptions. Essentially, Descartes seeks to prove to skeptics, those who believe there is absolutely no certain knowledge, that even by eliminating all assumptions with beliefs there remain several truths that evolve. From Meditation One, he then moves on to his further meditations that support human existence, the mind, God and the physical world.

Descartes first meditation, subtitled, Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful, is, as the name suggests, an exploration of what can be believed for certain – which, according to Descartes, is essentially nothing at all - in regard to our beliefs and assumed 'knowledge '. He begins by putting forward the argument that, having believed many

Descartes’s application of method as mentioned in Meditation II, he would doubt anything in his life to find one truth of the event. He would sweep all the understanding and reorganizations for clear mind that is not biased. Though the nature of human mind may not be perfect, but he declaim that he would false anything he used to know and restart of thinking or analogizing the problem in a completely new foundation without any hesitations. Certainty is the goal of his Meditation that makes him lived to find out, and he would even doubt the existence of the body and everything surrounding him.

Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy is a book containing six different meditations. The idea of doubt is seen through every meditation. The first meditation is composed almost completely of doubt. Descartes begins with explaining his problem. What he knows, or what he thought he knew, is based completely on false things. How can he continue to “know” these things if they are based on false assumptions? How can he go on knowing that anything he’d believed to be true could actually be false? Descartes then goes on to ask: then what is true? What is really true? He then decides that he will tear down his old “House of Knowledge” and build a new one based entirely on something that he can know is true without a doubt. Descartes’s tool that he uses to tear down his old house is doubt. He doesn’t use reasonable doubt, like we use today in courts. Descartes uses possible doubt. This means that he will disregard anything that could possibly be doubted in order to find something that cannot. If something can be doubted, Descartes believes that it can be false. After he finds something that cannot be doubted, then he can build a new house of knowledge and attempt to establish something firm and lasting in the sciences.

Descartes states in the beginning that all his youth year had been accepting the wrong view from outside the world, he started to doubt everything that he knows. He should get rid off all the view he believed before and restarted his view by established the foundation view when he is retired. He started on the basic line by questioning what he knows.

Descartes’ third meditation, also called "The existence of God," starts with the Meditator go through what he has discovered to date and how he is still very uncertain of the existence of physical things, but that he is confident that he exists and that he is an intelligent entity that has uncertainties, understandings, motivations, visualizations, and senses, among many other things. He is confident that he is a thoughtful thing and he evidently and distinctly notices this fact. He might not be confident without all pure and diverse observations can be certain. Consequently, he concludes, whatever he observes clearly and distinctly must be true. At one point, he believed he was sure of all kinds of things that he is now uncertain. These things

In the second meditation, Descartes is more certain that his mind exists then he is about his body.

Descartes was a philosopher that did not take any truth without questioning it. This is key in truly understanding the world around us. A real seeker of truth must doubt everything once in their lifetime. Without doubt, we have no reason. Without reason, we cannot hold any truths to be correct. Descartes truly understood how the rudiments vested in us by an infinite power play a powerful role in the way we live today.

René Descartes was a French philosopher that firmly believed in meditation and reflecting inside himself. Descartes’ was ultimately searching for something pure that he could find no doubt in. He uses the metaphor of rebuilding a house. He decides he needs to tear down the old house of all the knowledge he thought he knew to be true and rebuild it consisting of only knowledge without doubt. In order to build a foundation without any doubt Descartes’ needed to use skepticism or the Cartesian doubt, a systematic process of being skeptical about the truth of a belief, to secure what he was searching for.

With this foundation solidified, Descartes transitions in his second meditation to find this irrefutable certainty. The first meditation has provided the criteria for truth, that if something is to be considered true, it must rule out any possibility of fallacy, and after this Descartes dives into his pursuit of something that survives his skeptical test. The second meditation, subtitled “Concerning the Nature of the Human Mind: That It Is Better Known Than the Body”, begins with a quote regarding the previous meditation. “Yesterday’s meditation has thrown me into such doubts that I can no longer ignore them, yet I fail to see how they are to be resolved… Nevertheless I will work my way up and will once again attempt the same path I entered

This week we explored other three meditations of Descartes in his attempts to argue God’s existence. Mediation III presented a Cosmological Argument with Medication IV providing further explanation while Medication V presented an Ontological Argument. In Medication III, Descartes tries to dispel the notion of the Demon argument of Mediation II by that explaining that a finite (the demon) being cannot create another finite being (a person) with the knowledge of an infinite being. Only can an infinite being, namely God, can create a finite being with the ability to avoid errors. This is further explored in Mediation IV, where Descartes explained that it is when our unlimited will tries to pass judgment with our limited intelligence is when things

He asserts that the senses are key in obtaining knowledge, and human intellect is based on what is given to us by our ancestors from birth. For Descartes, human knowledge depends on absolute certainty. Since perception is unreliable according to Descartes, certain knowledge cannot come from the outside world via the senses (Descartes, 76). In other words we cannot always trust what we see, hear, feel, touch, and smell, for judgments made on the basis of these are often misconcieved. For example, we see a tower in the distance that looks to be a cylinder, but when we take a closer look we see that it is in fact a square-shaped tower. Descartes also focuses on dreams and how sometimes dreams are look and feel so real to the point that we don’t know if it is a dream or if the incident is really happening. Descartes also ellaborates on and expresses his doubt saying " what if we are all be decieved by an evil genius (instead of GOD)? What if such a being is tricking us all? Could we really know

In Meditation I, Descartes discusses those things that can be called into doubt. He starts off by talking about how he has been mislead by his beliefs before, so will start off by separating those beliefs that cause him to doubt. He would like to secure his foundational beliefs similar to a house, without a secure foundation, the house can fall.

When Descartes claims to know “I am… only a thinking being,” what he says he knows is an abstract truth about his nature. And so this piece of knowledge is similar to almost all of the other things which he will subsequently find that it knows: it is a necessary truth regarding a certain kind of thing’s having a particular nature or essence.