René Descartes The Discourse On The Method

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

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

Descartes wrote the Meditations on First Philosophy were first published in the year 1641 in Latin. There are six total Meditations that Descartes had written. One thing that

Descartes’ first meditation works in three stages: at first he tries to show that he does not have any empirical knowledge, meaning he does not have any knowledge based on his senses since he proved that his senses could possibly be deceiving him. He then says that it does not rule out his ‘a priori’ knowledge which is knowledge that does not require observation or experience but it is rather mathematical

Descartes first establishes his position; the reasons and ideas that lead him to formulate the method. While observing architecture he

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

Descartes, R., & Cress, D. (1998). Discourse on method; and Meditations on first philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett

When considering the case of God (or some creature of the sort of an angel), Descartes cites that God is not a deceiver, and thus that God could not be directly or indirectly conveying these ideas (with the indirect case being via some creature which only eminently contains the objective reality of these ideas and not formally). Descartes further establishes this point in stating that God did not grant a faculty by which one could determine that such a source (God or a being nobler than a body) was indeed supplying the ideas via some active faculty. Furthermore, God “has given…a great propensity to believe that they [, meaning the ideas of sensible objects] are produced by corporeal things” (Descartes 55). Thus, the active faculty must not be in God or any being nobler than a body. Rather, Descartes concludes that such an active faculty must be within something corporeal which therefore means that corporeal things do indeed exist.

The whole point of this method is for Descartes to find at least some truth that is way beyond any questions of doubt. However, what if people doubt that the two plus two does not equal to four but in reality of our minds, we all can conclude that is equals to four. After this point, Descartes introduces the idea of a “malicious god” or “evil demon” who’s only goal is to deceive us no matter what, Descartes says, “I will suppose, then, not that there is a supremely good God who is the source of all truth, but that there is an evil demon, supremely powerful and cunning, who works as hard as he can to deceive me” (Descartes 322.Right Side). Although we all know that two plus two equals four but what if the evil demon is deceiving us and in reality, it equals five. These three stages make up Descartes methodic doubt, where he attempts to remove all previous beliefs in order to find truth that is beyond any

Lastly, Descartes uses two methods to carry out the reconstruction of his thoughts. The first method is his four rules for conducting thought, which will characterize the way that he will look at the world during this period of reconstruction. The first rule is

On Meditation 1, the philosopher Rene Descartes centers on the idea that senses can not be trusted. Since in the past senses deceived him and let to false beliefs. Therefore his main concern is to erase all of the false beliefs he held to be true by analyzing and questioning which of them should be unreliable. Descartes, then, creates a new belief system in which all of the beliefs are correct.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes strives first and foremost to provide an infallibly justified foundation for the empirical sciences, and second to prove the existence of God. I will focus on the first and second meditations in my attempt to show that, in his skepticism of the sources of knowledge, he fails to follow the rules he has set out in the Discourse on Method. First I claim that Descartes fails to draw the distinction between pure sensation and inference, which make up what he calls sensation, and then consider the consequences of this failure to follow his method. Second, I will show that in his treatment of thinking Descartes fails to distinguish between active and passive thinking.

The Sixth meditation is the most complex, representing a genuine summary of the previous five. He feels the need to more precisely clarify and distinguish between what was a mind game, in respect to methodical doubt and what should be known as a reasonable truth, in a more geometrical view. Descartes argues the existence of material things appealing to imagination, which he placed first at a level of geometrical objects which refers to expansion. As geometry hosts the necessity and universality and it is granted by Devine perfection, results that even real which exists under its incidence in imagination must exist. As a result he separates understanding from imagination, stating that the human mind exists separately from the body, yet are joined to form a unit. It is important to note that Descartes does not claim to have reached a concrete and stable foundation. His claim to certainty of his ideas regarding existence and knowledge extends further past his own interpretation.

Descartes believes that knowledge comes from within the mind. This is a single indisputable fact to build on that can be gained through individual reflection. While seeking true knowledge, Descartes writes his Six Meditations. In these meditations, Descartes tries to develop a strong foundation, which all knowledge can be built upon. In the First Meditation, Descartes begins developing this foundation through the method of doubt. He casts doubt upon all his previous beliefs, including “matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable [and] those which appear to be manifestly false.” (Descartes, p.75, par.3) Once Descartes clears away all beliefs that can be called into doubt, he can then build a strong base for all true

Rene Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method” focuses on distinguishing the human rationale, apart from animals and robots. Wherein, he does so by explaining how neither animals, nor machines possess the same mental faculties as humans. For Descartes distinguishes the human rationale apart from non-humans, even though he does agree the two closely resemble each other because of their sense organs, and physical functions (Descartes, pp22). Nevertheless, it is because the mechanical lacks a necessary aspect of the mind, which consequently separates them from humans. For in Descartes “Discourse on the Method,” he argues that the noteworthy difference between humans, and the mechanical is that machines are only responding to the world through of their sense organs. Whereas humans possess the significant faculties of reasoning, which allows them to understand external inputs and information obtained from the surrounding environment. This significantly creates a dividing ‘line’, which separates humans from non-humans. For in this paper, I will firstly distinguish the differences between the human and mechanical’s mentality in regards to Descartes “Discourse on the Method”. Secondly, I will theorize a modern AI that could possess the concept of an intellectual mind, and then hypothesize a powerful AI that lacks the ability to understand its intelligence. Lastly, in disagreeing in why there are no such machines that is equivalent to the human mind. For humans don’t possess all the