Descartes 'First Meditation'

Descartes first presents this idea with the statement "How often does my evening slumber persuade me of such ordinary things as these: that I am here, clothed in my dressing gown, seated next to the fireplace -- when in fact I am lying undressed in bed!" (Descartes 490). By using an experience of his own, Descartes shows how dreams can be asymptotic to reality. Descartes implies that he often sits next to his fireplace, clothed in his dressing gown, so his dream that he is doing so is very believable. In conclusion, one cannot distinguish between a dream and reality because the gradient between them is so finitely small at times.

There are three forms of doubts that Descartes believes in, one of which is the defective nature of doubt. The defective nature of doubt is reasonable because it gives Descartes a clean slate to begin doubting everything he’s uncertain of. Because Descartes wants knowledge and truth, he starts to look to doubt. To gain knowledge and truth one must have cautious perceptive that contains no doubt. Therefore, Descartes thinks that since the foundation of his knowledge had uncertain characteristics, he must take apart his knowledge and destroy everything he thought he knew. Then he starts to build his knowledge back up but only with things that he is certain of.

Clear your mind, if you will, of everything you have ever seen or known to be true. To begin understanding Rene Descartes’ method of doubt, you need to suspend all prejudice and prior judgments and start with a clean slate “for the purpose of discovering some ultimate truth on which to base all thought.” (Kolak, Pg.225). Discouraged with much skepticism from his own beliefs, Descartes was embarrassed of his own ignorance. He set out to try and accomplish the task of finding an absolute truth in which he would base his beliefs. Placing upon himself a task to find an axiom or absolute truth to base all thought, “he ventured as a youth in travel to collect a variety in experiences to derive some

In order to weigh up these arguments, it is important to understand Descartes’ reasons for formulating them: Descartes’ believes that it is important to be certain of the things that one believes to be true which, in turn, causes him to question the things that he has been certain of thus far. Because of this, he forms these arguments to further consider his theories about doubt and what it is to be truly certain of anything.

Descartes has written a set of six meditations on the first philosophy. In these meditations he analyzes his beliefs and questions where those beliefs were derived from. The first mediation of Descartes discusses his skeptical hypotheses; questioning the validity of the influences of his knowledge. He has a few main goals that are expressed through the first meditation. First off, Descartes wants to build a firm foundation of knowledge that is also concrete. Through probing his mind for answers to all of his skeptical thoughts, he hopes to eliminate the skepticism and find true, unquestionable knowledge. Descartes has mapped out ways to

The one thing Descartes cannot doubt is that he exists, because he thinks and question the world around him. Descartes felt that our senses and perception of can skew every aspect of our understanding of reality, so only the fact that he exists is without doubt. This reasoning is known as solipsism (1). Basically, everything seen, felt, heard, or experienced are misrepresented by perception. With perception skewing everything, the only certainty is mind and the thoughts it holds, not necessarily that the thoughts are correct.

Descartes’ method of radical doubt focuses upon finding the truth about certain things from a philosophical perspective in order to truly lay down a foundation for ideas that have the slightest notion of doubt attached to them. He believed that there was “no greater task to perform in philosophy, than assiduously to seek out, once and for all, the best of all these arguments and to lay them out so precisely and plainly that henceforth all will take them to be true demonstrations” (Meditations, 36). The two key concepts that Descartes proves using the method of doubt are that the “human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists” as mentioned in his Letter of Dedication, since there are many that don’t believe the mentioned concepts because of the fact that they have not been proven or demonstrated. (Meditations, 35). In order to prove the above, he lays out six Meditations, each focusing on a different theme that leads us “to the knowledge of our mind and of God, so that of all things that can be known by the human mind, these latter are the most certain and the most evident” (Meditations, 40).

Descartes's believed he could doubt everything that could be doubted, and the remainder was be the

At the beginning of Meditation three, Descartes has made substantial progress towards defeating skepticism. Using his methods of Doubt and Analysis he has systematically examined all his beliefs and set aside those which he could call into doubt until he reached three beliefs which he could not possibly doubt. First, that the evil genius seeking to deceive him could not deceive him into thinking that he did not exist when in fact he did exist. Second, that his essence is to be a thinking thing. Third, the essence of matter is to be flexible, changeable and extended.

In the first meditation, "Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", Descartes main goal is to distinguish what it is he can take to be true, and what supposed truths hold even the smallest degree of doubt. When he reviews all of his opinions he concludes "eventually [he] is forced to admit that there is nothing among the things [he]believed to be true which it is not permissable to doubt--and not out of frivolity or lack of forethought, but for valid and considered reasons. Thus [he] must be no less careful to withhold assent henceforth even from these beliefs then [he] would from those that are patently false, if [he wishes] to find anything certain."(Pg62) At the beginning of Descartes' meditations, he finds that there is really no concrete pillars of knowledge to base the foundations of his supposed

Descartes starts of his meditations with a very simple idea. That he has no concreate evidence that he, or anything else exists. Descartes has a few reasons to question his existence, the first on being that our senses can be deceived, easily enough in our everyday lives. How are we supposed to trust the senses that are known to fail us quite frequently? Another reason Descartes gives for doubting is the fact that an evil mastermind could have been our image of God, constantly trying to change how we see things or manipulating our thoughts, and perceptions. The last reason for doubt that Descartes talks about is the possibility that all of existence could have been, and will be a dream. Dreams are so realistic that anyone inside the dream would

Descartes' meditations are created in pursuit of certainty, or true knowledge. He cannot assume that what he has learned is necessarily true, because he is unsure of the accuracy of its initial source. In order to purge himself of all information that is possibly wrong, he subjects his knowledge to methodic doubt. This results in a (theoretical) doubt of everything he knows. Anything, he reasons, that can sustain such serious doubt must be unquestionable truth, and knowledge can then be built from that base. Eventually, Descartes doubts everything. But by doubting, he must exist, hence his "Cogito ergo sum".

     Through his philosophical search Descartes was able to find one indubitable certainty, that we are thinking beings. We always think, even when we have doubts that we are thinking we are still thinking because a doubt is a thought. Although Descartes found this one universal truth, he was still not able to believe in anything but the fact that he was a thinking being. Therefore he still doubted everything around him. He used this one certainty to try to find a system of knowledge about everything in the world. Descartes idea was to propose a hypothesis about something. For example he might say that a perfect being was in existence. He would go around this thought in a methodical way, doubting it, all the while trying to identify it as a certainty. Doubting everything was at first dangerous because in doubting everything he was also admitting that he doubted the existence of God, and thus opposing the church. However he made it a point to tell us at the beginning of his Discourse on Methods that what he was writing was only for himself and that he expected no one but himself to follow it (Descartes 14, 15). Descartes eventually managed to prove the existence of a higher being. He said that since he had the idea of a perfect being, then that perfect being must exist. His

In Meditations on First Philosophy, it is the self-imposed task of Descartes to cast doubt upon all which he knows in order to build a solid foundation of knowledge out of irrefutable truths. Borrowing an idea from

Firstly, Descartes deals with the issue of empiricism- the theory that our knowledge is derived from our sensory experiences. Since we know from everyday errors that our senses have the ability to deceive us fairly often so making our perceptions to be something that it is not. For example, there are lots of examples of optical illusions and the fact that the train tracks may appear to converge from a distance. Consequently, we ought to