The Question Of Human Existence

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.

     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.

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).

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.

Descartes claims that sensation is deceptive, and therefore cannot be trusted. He says that our senses tell us that distant objects are small, when they are actually large. Descartes goes on to state that “it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once” (Descartes, First Meditation, 2). Descartes then proceeds to prove his claims about human knowledge through deductive reasoning. First, he claims that sensation is deceitful, so we cannot trust anything that our bodies or senses perceive. Next, Descartes states that if God is

Descartes is very quick to reject empirical beliefs; arguing that our senses are not exactly the most reliable sources of information. He tried to point out that our senses fail us immensely. I am positive we can all work out times where our senses gave us faulty information. For example, waving at someone who’s slightly resembles a friend or an acquaintance, but it just turns out that your eyes were playing tricks on you and they are in fact just a stranger. He uses this premise depict the inaccuracy of our

Descartes begins the method of doubt by how he was struck by the large number of falsehoods that he had accepted in his youth that was taken to be true, and how doubtful they were and had subsequently built upon them. Since he knows that many of his beliefs are based on false opinions, he is not sure which of them he can trust and which he can’t. Descartes presents his philosophical project, and claims that he needs to put into questions the truth of all his beliefs. Descartes shows that we can doubt the truth of all our beliefs by two main arguments, the Dream Argument and the Evil Genius argument. I agree with the fact that Descartes suggest there isn’t any objective way to confirm whether we are awake.

Descartes states that he had believed in false opinions and facts throughout his life. In order for him to “establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences,” he must cast into doubt the foundations of his knowledge and build his knowledge on a new and more certain foundation.

When Descartes begins in his first meditation, he shows doubt in the things that most of us have never even considered to be inaccurate information. For example, he points out the fact that we could very well be asleep at this exact moment. He says that though it may seem like real life, it could easily be the most vivid dream we have ever experienced. After that he goes on to explain that not only may right now be a dream, but everything we have ever conceived to be real life may be a dream as well. He practically says that for all we know, we could have hit our heads and gone into a coma when we were small children and never even realized it. Or maybe we are already dead and we are reliving our lives in a dream. Descartes also makes us

The skeptical argument of Descartes opens with how he reflects on several lies that he has believed throughout his life and on the following faultiness of the body of knowledge he has made up from these lies. He has decided to sweep all he thought that he knew so as to begin again from the foundations, to be able to build up his knowledge once again and on more sure grounds. In order to display that science rested on sure strong foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the sense, he began by carrying into doubt all the principles that come to us from the senses. His intention in these arguments is not categorically to prove that there is none that exists or that it is unmanageable for the people to known if anything exists,

His first doubt in his book is the knowledge gained through his senses. " Whatever I have accepted until now as mostly true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely in those who have deceived us, even once (Descartes). Descartes believed that knowledge gained through sense experience could not be reliable because he could not prove whether he was actually experiencing something or just dreaming of that particular experience.

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