Rene Descartes Meditations - 1093 Words

Rene Descartes’s Meditations on first Philosophy starts under a very ingenious pretense: find the one thing that is undoubtable. Being a subjectivist and one of the first modern philosophers, he tried to doubt everything he believed to be true. He took metaphysics and logic with certainty and implored the skeptical method to everything else. He began to look at senses and realized that it was merely a representation in your brain. He was in aware of the mind brain separation and how perception is very deceiving. However, the one baseline truth he found was that he exists because he is a thinking rational being. Despite his enlightened start, he spends the remaining meditations trying to prove the existence of God, which is ironically, something that, is very doubtable. In Meditation III Descartes utilizes the criteria of certainty, that everything he is to prove must be clear and distinct. He is a rationalist and believes that innate ideas are born within and derive from reaso n. These are important premises when looking at his first argument for God’s existence. He operates under the assumption that we, as rational beings, cannot be wrong about having an idea. Ideas are judgments that confirm something in the real world. His first argument can be called from the idea of God. Directly this concludes that the idea of God is too great to have thought of by anyone but God. However, this argument is ultimately flawed and does not directly answer theShow MoreRelatedDiscourse On Method And Meditations On First Philosophy945 Words   |  4 PagesDiscourse 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 nonRead MoreLanguage and the Destiny of Man12402 Words   |  50 Pagessought to clarify the matter. He sought to distinguish between two terms, â€Å"distinction† and â€Å"separation† and to illuminate the relationship between body and soul at three different levels, i.e. ordinary experience, analytical mind and metaphysical meditation. Eventually, he embraced the paradox of the two natures – the double substantial make-up of the human being, a paradox of patristic inspiration. However, the later history of ideas was not sympathetic to Descartes: nowadays, when one looks up the