Descartes And Geometry: True Or False?

He gives another scenario of when he lies in the bed he can dream that his he is sitting by the fire with is nightgown when in fact there is no such event he is undressed in the bed. This reinforces that idea one cannot trust what one is experiencing to actually be real. What proof can one bring that one awake other than oneself “just knowing”. This is the point Descartes wan to call to attention.

In Descartes’ First Meditation, Descartes’ overall intention is to present the idea that our perceptions and sensations are flawed and should not be trusted entirely. His purpose is to create the greatest possible doubt of our senses. To convey this thought, Descartes has three main arguments in the First Meditation: The dream argument, the deceiving God argument, and the evil demon “or evil genius”. Descartes’ dream argument argues that there is no definite transition from a dream to reality, and since dreams are so close to reality, one can never really determine whether they are dreaming

Descartes’ Dreaming Argument comes from his thinking that there is no way of knowing if you are sleeping or if you are awake. To know something is to have no doubt of a fact, it must be a justified true belief. To be justified it must hold logical reason, you cannot state something is true without evidence. In order for it to be true it is not enough to justify it, but it must be justified with true facts. Finally, you must believe it, in order to know something it must be true in your mind. As a result Descartes doubts his consciousness as he cannot truly know that he is awake. This spurs Descartes to question if any perceived knowledge of reality is really true. Descartes calls his senses into questions as he notes, “it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once” and therefore concludes that as a result it is prudent, never to trust his sense. In

     On the journey to find truth to base all thought upon, Descartes explains his first step in doing so. “Never accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.”(Kolak, Pg.228). Assuming that everything you see is fictitious, Descartes believed he had no senses at all; “body, shape, extension, motion, and place are unreal.”(Weissman, Pg.23). Our senses have failed us all at one point or another in our lives, so why use the senses as a base for thought? The most famous quote and philosophy by Descartes in history ever, “Je pense, donc je suis, cogito ergo sum” (Durant, Pg.639). “I think, therefore I am” was the first step towards a basis to understand truth, and leaning away from truth through the senses.

Descartes dreaming argument suggests that perhaps our senses cannot be fully trusted because we cannot be certain we are not dreaming, and this means we therefore cannot be certain of anything. His evil demon argument is similar but uses the idea of an evil demon deceiving you instead of your senses. These sceptical arguments mean that we cannot be certain of anything at all for it may be happening whilst we are dreaming, or we are being tricked into thinking it is happening. I do not agree with Descartes because I feel that I can be certain I am not dreaming, and I do not believe that other supernatural creatures; such as an evil demon exists.

It is deception from the sense that causes this mistrust for Descartes and brings forth the Dream Argument. The human senses as well feel very real, just as they do in reality, and this is one of the first things that have Descartes question the differences between being awake and dream. Due to the trust issues it he becomes unsure of whether he is dreaming or not. When it comes to dreaming Descartes thinks that there could possibility that some certain God that may have easily deceived him in falsely believing in things could appear to be correct but are not. However Descartes says that it God is described as a supremely good being (Descartes, 21). God has always been a being that is worshiped and why would so many people worship an evil God if he brings no positives to their lives. Descartes however is not 100 percent positive on whether God is being deceptive or not being deceptive. James Hill says that “[the] key move that Descartes then makes is to highlight the lack of insight one has into one’s condition when dreaming. It is this lack of insight, and Descartes’ way of interpreting it, which forms the backbone of the dreaming argument” (Hill, 2). To shorten that down, the minimal explanations to why and how dreams occur is the foundation for Descartes’s Dream Argument.

In his defense, Descartes argues that our knowledge of the wax depends only on the ideas we conceive in our mind. This creates the difficulty of reaching an agreement on the identity of the wax, and that understanding the body can vary for each individual perception. As it is evident that the substantiality of

     This is where the wax argument comes into play. All the properties of the piece of wax that we perceive with the senses change as the wax melts. This is true as well of its primary properties, such as shape, extension and size. Yet the wax remains the same piece of wax as it melts. We know the wax through our mind and judgement, not through our senses or imagination. Therefore, every act of clear and distinct knowledge of corporeal matter also provides even more certain evidence for the existence of Descartes as a thinking thing. Therefore his mind is much clearer and more distinctly know to him than his body. At this

He then tells us his final perspective on how he perceives the wax. “It remains then for me to concede that I do not grasp what this wax is through the imagination; rather, I perceive it through the mind alone.” (Descartes, 22) He ends his argument on how he perceives the wax with telling us that it is not our imagination that grasps all of the perceptions of the wax, but the mind that does it.

As with almost all of Descartes inquiries the roots of his second argument for the existence of God begin with his desire to build a foundation of knowledge that he can clearly and distinctly perceive. At the beginning of the third meditation Descartes once again recollects the things that he knows with certainty. The problem arises when he attempts to clearly and distinctly understand truths of arithmetic and geometry. Descartes has enough evidence to believe these things, but one major doubt is still present; the possibility of God being a deceiver. Descartes worry is that all the knowledge that he possesses through intuition could potentially be false if God merely chooses to deceive him. So in order to have a clear and distinct perception of arithmetic truths (and other such intuitive truths) Descartes delves into the question of God’s existence (and whether this God could be a deceiver or not).

Dream Skepticism has been debated largely since Descartes’ projection of those ideas. Descartes believed many irrational thoughts in relation to dreaming, which proposed ideas that nobody at his time had ever seen before. Descartes’ challenging of the traditional ideas and proposing new ones in which challenged the minds of the individuals, as well as trying to convince the masses that dreaming had some sort of value for an individual that would carry on into his conscious world. Throughout these different ideas lied his main notion: the dreams produced in the human brain while unconscious are not false or fiction, rather, they present the truths that lie in our very minds and therefor should hold value to the dreamer himself. Descartes believed

The question that he had, which becomes the basis of the argument, was how can one differentiate between dreaming and being awake? This becomes a vital part of his hypothesis. Descartes is known to doubt the doubt and research the doubt before he can deem it as truth. He does this via Method of Doubt. This argument is similar to that of his senses being prone to deceit.

were innate still had to come from somewhere. If they are in our heads when we

In Descartes’ “The Wax Argument” Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he starts his argument off with the ideology of grasping the essence of the piece of wax. He lays down three faculties through which he reaches his conclusion: either by sensation, by imagination, or by an understanding of the mind alone. He states and concludes that we are able to grasp the essence of wax through the understanding of our mind alone and it cannot be proven through imagination or sensation. He uses many premises to reach this argument. The first premise is about the wax possessing scent, color, shape, hardness, size, and coldness.

Descartes then presented the deceiving God argument in the means of explaining that there is a reason to doubt any knowledge achieved through reasoning, including geometrical and mathematical properties. In the deceiving God argument Descartes noted that we believe that an in all powerful God created us. He also gave us senses that can deceive us. Thus, it is possible that we are deceived even of our mathematical and geometrical knowledge. He then replied to the objection that “God is all Good” by stating that if this is the case, then God would not give us deceiving senses. To the objection that “there is no God” he replied that if this is the case, then the one who created us would be less perfect than us, and we would have more reasons to