Rene Descartes Wax Argument

The main in Descartes Meditations 1 and 2 is that the method of gaining knowledge just through the senses is wrong, Descartes advocates for the method of gaining knowledge through the existing mind or intellect not through senses alone. He backs up his first argument reflecting on his life and how he believed things because of his senses. He then gives then gives the example of his dreams in which his senses tell him some things are true, in turn he believes them. In the second meditation he backs up his argument by stating the disconnection we as humans have from the mind and the world. He gives the example of the wax explaining we can’t gain knowledge about the wax based of just senses but it requires us to also use intellect.

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.

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

Rene Descartes’ third meditation from his book Meditations on First Philosophy, examines Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God. The purpose of this essay will be to explore Descartes’ reasoning and proofs of God’s existence. In the third meditation, Descartes states two arguments attempting to prove God’s existence, the Trademark argument and the traditional Cosmological argument. Although his arguments are strong and relatively truthful, they do no prove the existence of God.

Descartes concludes from his first meditation that he is a thinking thing, and as long as he thinks, he exists. In the second meditation, Descartes attempts to define what the “thinking thing” that he concluded himself to be in the first meditation actually was. Descartes’ determines that he gains knowledge of the world, that is, knowledge that is separate from the mind, through the senses; and that the senses can deceive. This he outlines within the first meditation, and mentions on the second meditation. Furthermore, in the second meditation, Descartes refuses to define himself as a rational animal, instead going back and relying on labeling him mind as a thinking thing. In the fifth and sixth paragraphs of the second meditation, Descartes distinguishes the body from the soul. Descartes indicates that there is the presence of the body, and it seems to be in the physical world, but he also notes that his mind does not seem to exist in the same manner. Descartes also claims that the ability to perceive is a power of the soul, but inoperable without the body. Descartes then explores another object with physical substance, which is a piece of wax. The piece of wax is undeniably physical; it takes up space within the material world. The body falls into the category, just as any other physical object in the material world. The main point of Descartes’ second meditation is that any given person can know more about their mind than of the world surrounding them.

The reasoning behind the investigation of the wax in the second meditation is that the wax serves as an analogy of our perception on life and what we assume is truth. Descartes believed that many or even most of the truths we know could in fact be an illusion. This means that

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy was written by Rene Descarte. His main focus was to decide if God was real or not and if God created him or not. In Meditation Five, Descarte states that God existed because he has prior knowledge of materialistic things. He states that he recalls objects without prior knowledge of them, and that everyone perceives all the objects in the same type of manner. In the end of the mediation he closes it out by stating that, we all can think of non existent things with the same idea of what they are without them existing, thus proving that God exists in some manner, creating us with this information. In Meditation Five, Descarte focuses on proving God’s existence by considering the properties belonging to God 's essence. In this paper Descarte is trying to prove the existence of God through his pre existing knowledge of objects and ideas. He is wrong due to his examples being based on the big picture and not the small details that prove his ideas wrong.

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 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.

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

Rene Descartes Meditations is known to be one of his most famous works, it has also shown to be very important in Philosophical Epistemology. Within the meditation’s he provides many arguments that remove pre-existing notions, and bring it to the root of its foundation which Descartes, then will come up with his indubitable foundation of knowledge to defeat any doubt and to prove God is real. Descartes was a “foundationalist”, by introducing a new way of knowledge and with clearing up how people thought about things prior. Descartes took knowledge to its very foundations, and from there he can build up from it. In this essay, I will be discussing Descartes, and analyzing his first two meditations and arguing that he does indeed succeed in his argument.

Descartes uses the ‘wax argument’ in order to present his observations in ‘Mediation II’. He starts off by discussing a piece of wax (a body) as fresh from honeycomb. He then provides a detailed description of it through what his senses perceive. For example, he describes, “Its color, shape size are plain to see; it is hard, cold…if you rap it with your knuckle it makes a sound” (Descartes 1988, p.84). He then puts the wax by fire wherein it melts and all the qualities we had earlier perceived of it disappear.

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

He regards the “I” as a thinking soul/mind. The problem of identity is also described by Descartes as essence versus existence. When comparing the wax, Descartes talked about mental and subjective thoughts and bodily or objective things. Descartes concluded that regardless of the shape that wax took place or what his mind perceived it to look like it would still remain just wax. Descartes bridges the gap by mentioning that he understands and is capable of being created by God so it makes sense with his understanding of it and being capable to being separated since they are both distinct. (pp.206-207, Descartes)

I enjoyed Reading Descartes’ Meditation and the lecture notes. Descartes’ Meditation describes in detail on his thought process and delivers his main idea, the cogito. The evidence that Descartes presented is fascinating. The wax analogy gets me thinking deeper and change my perspective. Descartes reminds me that our brain does more than just sensing. Subconsciously, we make connection and observation all the time. For example, my hand will automatically type the password when I start the computer, or I could recall a painful memory in a particular place without thinking. Also, we do not let our perception to limit our curiosity for knowledge and imagination. Consciously, we are trying to understand the world or trying to solve a problem. The