Descartes ' First Meditations By Rene Descartes

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.

The topic of this essay is Descartes’ First Meditations and I will be discussing in detail the Dreaming argument and the Evil Demon argument.

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

The last step in Descartes argument says if he cannot tell whether he is dreaming, then how can he trust any of his senses telling him about the environment? To know anything about the external world on the basis of his sensory experiences, it seems like

While it can be said that premise 1 is true, many people disagree strongly with premise 2. Descartes claims that we cannot be certain that we are not dreaming, but our dreaming experiences and our waking experiences are dissimilar. Our dreams often do not make sense and do not fit into a consistent and comprehensible timeline of events unlike our waking experiences. Even in circumstances where dreams are vivid and seem real for a short period of time, we are able to recall these dreams and acknowledge that they were not real life events. On the other hand, this view can be challenged by recognising we appear to be awake when we think about our dreams, but Descartes objective is to make the reader consider if it is possible that even the process of waking and reflecting upon a dream is part of the dream itself, thus reinforcing the idea that we are unable to differentiate between dreaming and being awake. The final limitation of this argument that I would like to discuss within this essay is its paradoxical nature. Although the premises of this argument appear reasonable, the conclusion seems ridiculous. While the conclusion does follow from the premises, creating a valid argument, the conclusion remains arguably unacceptable.

Descartes organised his ideas on knowledge and skepticism to establish two main arguments, the dreaming argument and the evil demon argument. The dreaming argument suggests that it is not possible to distinguish between having a waking experience and dreaming an experience. Whereas, the evil demon argument suggests that we are deceived in all areas of our experiences by an evil demon. This essay will investigate the validity of the arguments and to what extent the conclusion of these arguments is true. The soundness and the extent to which the premises are true will also be explored. After evaluating these arguments it will be concluded that the dreaming argument is valid, but is not sound. Whereas, the evil demon argument is both valid and sound.

Many different interpretations of Descartes’ dream argument could derive from his theory. In lecture we interpreted Descartes’ Dream Argument as follows:

One of Rene Descartes’s most famous arguments, from his not only from his first meditation but all of the meditations, is his Dream Argument. Descartes believes that there is no way to be able to distinguish being in awake from being in a state of dreaming. In fact you could actually be in a dream right now. Rene Descartes’s theory that one is unable distinguish being awake from dreaming, as interesting as it is, can be at times a little farfetched, along with a few contradictions to himself, Descartes’s dream argument does not entitle himself to any sort of claim.

In Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes does and experiment with wax to try to prove that things actually exist in this world. This essay is going to prove how we can tell that things actually exist and what can perceive the wax.

For the Dream Argument, the skeptical hypothesis argues that our current perceptions of the world using our senses are that of a dream. Stroud argues that Descartes intends on using such a skeptical hypothesis as a pre-condition of being able to know anything with our senses. However, it is the aim of this paper, through discussing Stroud’s interpretation of Descartes’ Dream Argument to argue that maintaining such a reading of the Dream Argument ensures that if one agrees with the premise “a condition of knowing anything about the world is that he knows he is not dreaming” (21), the radical skeptic would have

Descartes’ dream argument establishes itself based on the premise that I cannot distinguish between my most clear and evident perceptions and vivid dreams. He begins this argument by pointing out how our main source of belief, our senses, can be deceptive. Descartes flirts with the idea that possibly his senses are deceiving because he is insane.

I mentioned Rene Descartes earlier in my writing and want to unpack his thinking a little more. In “Meditation on the First Philosophy,” Descartes starts to question whether he can really tell the difference between being asleep and being awake. He says the following: “Let us then suppose* that we are dreaming, and that these particular things (that we have our eyes open, are moving our head, stretching out our hands) are not true; and that perhaps we do not even have hands or the rest of a body like what we see. It must nonetheless be admitted that the things we see in sleep are, so to speak, painted

Dreaming is something we all are subject to. Every night when we lay down in our beds we dream, now whether or not we can remember our dreams is a different story. Dreams can be very realistic and they have been speculated and researched but we know little about our dreams, what they mean, and the sensations or feelings they provide for us. As far as we know dreaming is our unconscious mind acting out desires, possibly because we cannot do them or experience those events in our waking life. Since dreaming is so under researched and we know little about it, it has been speculated by many people. Rene Descartes go in depth on this subject and his ideas on what dreaming is arguing that we cannot distinguish the difference between being awake and being asleep. That is a very bold statement and put in a seemingly simplistic way, recorded in his first meditations. What Descartes does is challenge our preconceived notions of dreaming and puts us in the frame of mind to answer for ourselves if we are dreaming right now or are we actually experiencing reality. Descartes makes us come face to face with the reality that we actually don’t know if we are dreaming. His claims that we may be dreaming is a well-known philosophical argument in the Western world and I hope to discover the truth behind his argument and shed light on how I perceive his philosophy on the dreaming world. I will shed light on this dream argument by interpreting what Descartes says, other

Rene Descartes decision to shatter the molds of traditional thinking is still talked about today. He is regarded as an influential abstract thinker; and some of his main ideas are still talked about by philosophers all over the world. While he wrote the "Meditations", he secluded himself from the outside world for a length of time, basically tore up his conventional thinking; and tried to come to some conclusion as to what was actually true and existing. In order to show that the sciences rest on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the senses, Descartes must begin by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to him by the senses. This is done in the first of six

In Descartes’s Meditation I and Meditation II, he proposes several arguments expressing how waking and dreaming states are indistinguishable from each other. In this paper I will argue why I think Descartes is wrong in believing that we, humans, don’t have any knowledge; I will also analyze Descartes Cogito argument.