Descartes Essay 1000 Words

The Latin "Cogito, ergo sum" [I think, therefore I am]

The first piece of Descartes Meditation, Descartes attempts to review the beliefs he has been taught in order to establish truth in science. He forms a sceptical belief or hypotheses about everything in the physical world. As a result he suspends his judgement on his previously held beliefs. In the second Meditation, Descartes expands theory on the Ð''nature of human mind', Descartes questions his identity, the eternal Ð''I', and introduces a theory of representationalism, and lays down the thought that Ð''one's consciousness implies one's existence'.

Descartes, in his third part of Descartes Meditation, discusses that there are three main categories of thoughts such as

* volitions

* affections and

* judgements

and propounds that there are two main cause and effect relationships within classes of thought. He states that the two cause and effect relationship within such classes of thought include:

* whether our thoughts do not deceive us or

* whether we are deceived by our thoughts

Furthermore, Descartes, after analysis of such aforementioned classes of thought, also establishes the existence of Ð''I' and God.

General review The Meditations

His leading work in physics, mathematics, optics, physiology, geometry and astronomy would have been quite enough to mark out Descartes as one of the founders of the Western way of thinking. But this petit bourgeois former soldier from La Haye in central France determined to round-off his career in the sciences by presenting to the world his thoughts on how it is, and why, we construct truth.

These Meditations begin by attempting to doubt everything, and to build up from that to those few things which we can know with certainty. The result is an idea of the human as essentially spiritual, but temporarily connected to a material body, which knows that its perceptions are valid because God is no deceiver. And how do we know about God? Because we couldn't have even the concept of so perfect a being unless God had put it into us, like the mark of the craftsman on his work.

But isn't this no more than saying that "I know what I know", and justifying this by saying "one of the things I know is a benevolent God" in a pointlessly circular process of introspection? Possibly so, but the Meditations may still be seen as a foundation of modern philosophy inasmuch as it, as with all the best philosophy, properly asks the right questions for its time, questions which we are only now discovering how to answer.

Descartes was extraordinarily honest, at least by the standards of his time, in circulating the manuscript of The Meditations for comment and publishing these "Objections and Replies" alongside the text. These are actually larger than the original book and are rarely reproduced today, but we include a precis of the dialog with Thomas Hobbes to give a feel of the whole.

My favorite Points

I: Many of the things I used to be certain of, I now know to be nonsense. To find some firm foundation

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