philosophy

Philosophy 101, Summer Semester 2021

Handout #1

René Descartes, Meditations

First Meditation

· Fundamental question: what beliefs may we take to be indubitably true?

· Suggestion: since it will be an endless task to scrutinize all of one’s beliefs individually, Descartes will challenge the ‘principles upon which all (his) former opinions were based’

· One such principle states that sensory information yields true beliefs

· Yet it is obvious that our senses can deceive us

· Consider dreams: the dreamer represents things that are not currently present

· Things represented in dreams, though imagined, resemble things we experience in our waking life

· Maybe ‘very simple and general things’ exist, of which the mind makes use to imagine more complex individual things?

· Laws of geometry and arithmetic may constitute such general truths

· But there is no certainty that they do

· Presupposition: existence of an ‘evil demon’ who is intent on deceiving the reasoner

· Is there anything left whose existence we have reason not to doubt?

Second Meditation

· I cannot take it for granted that I have a body

· But I cannot doubt that I exist: otherwise I could not be deceived

· ‘I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in my mind’

· But what am I?

· A thinking thing: a thing that doubts, perceives, affirms, denies, wills, etc.

· It is certain that it seems to me that I see light: I am hence a perceiving thing

· How does perception work?

· Example of the wax: ‘the perception of it…is not an act of sight…., but only an intuition of the mind’

· It follows from the fact that I (think I) see that I am

· Since perception of external act is a mental (and not a physical) event, knowledge of one’s own mind is obtained more easily than any other kind of knowledge