Essay On Descartes Proof Of The External World

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Descartes starts by doubting everything that is around him and presents a list of arguments such as the dream argument, the deceiving God argument, and the evil genius argument in order to do so. However, he then attempts to overcome his doubts and finds himself trying to prove the existence of the material world. He does so by contemplating the alternative probable causes of his ideas of the material world (Sperring, Descartes’ Proof of the External World, 1). Throughout this paper, I will study the possible causes of his ideas of material objects. These are Descartes himself, God, some sort of powerful evil genius and those material objects themselves. He refutes three of those in order to prove that our ideas of material objects are in …show more content…

To make this clearer we can use the clockmaker example. If a clockmaker makes a clock that never tells the right time, then I can rightfully blame its maker for making a defaulted clock. Therefore, if I think that material objects exist and possess certain attributes, independently of my mind, and that they cause my ideas of them, and I am wrong about this assumption, God would also be considered a bad “clockmaker” (Sperring, Descartes’ Proof of the External World, 3). Except that since God is a good “clockmaker”, I can’t be wrong about my assumption. In other terms, since I don’t have any faculty that can make me recognize that my sensory experiences aren’t of material objects that are extended, “existing in a mind independent realm of extended items”, and since they do not reveal a divine origin that would make me think my ideas of material objects are placed directly in my mind by God, then the material objects I observe must exist and my ideas of them cannot be placed in my mind by God. The only option left is that the ideas I have of those material objects are caused by those objects themselves (Kemerling, Descartes: Human Nature,

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