Descartes

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate January 2002

download word file, 6 pages 0.0

Well first of all it is very difficult to understand what he is trying to get across. But what he was trying to do throughout all his meditations was to cleanse his mind of everything he had heard or thought about God to get a clear base to build his new ideas on. The way that I thought about it was in terms of a house. Say you started with a fully built house and tore it all down till you just had the foundation of the house left. Then build an entire new house based on totally different ideas and plans. And When Descartes gets to this single foundation this is what he needed to base all his arguments from. His meaning in his meditation is to find out what God is at the deepest truest level.

During his first meditation he Questions the realism of things what is actually real and does the stuff we see actually exist as we see it.

He tries to bring across the point that material things exist with a certain amount of doubt about their realism. He explains this with a little more depth by explaining that when a man goes to sleep he dreams about what we don't know but the point is that when we dream we dream things like we were a King or with a really hot women. It seem so real like when you wore the crown on your head and when the women in your dreams touches you it seems so real that we couldn't distinguish it from reality when we wake up. Point being how do we know we are not dreaming when we think we are awake, how do you know that your hands are what they seem and not someone else's. How do...