Descartes' Systematic Approach to Discovering Truth

Descartes had a desire to achieve true truth, in this it became apparent for him to set up a system that would allow him to achieve such an aspiration. One of Descartes most ambitious undertakings was to prove that there was a God and a soul; here his system was utilized. In following this system he would gradually come to conclusions that were not only true and increased his knowledge, but also were easily understood so others were able to follow his methods as well. These rules were, to never except anything that was not true as a truth, to take a problem and divide it into as many parts as possible, then from least difficult to most, slowly answer each problem in turn, and finally to review everything in this process; in following these

What this means is that, when coming upon a question it is the persons responsibility, when answering, to never accept anything as truth; until it has been fully examined through harsh reasoning. Through this it will becomes known as true to the person. That is, to rule out all flaws with both the question and answer by self means. In doing this all unnecessary information and possibilities are gone and cannot corrupt the answer that will become apparent to the person. For Descartes, it was first needed to avoid hasty judgments and prejudices. We understand that anything that we accept without fully scrutinizing it to questions is a hasty judgment and that any notion that is thought up with, and examined with, pre-judment is a prejudice; that is to say, any outside information or preconceptions should be omitted along with answers that “pop-up” in our mind without fully understanding and questing the issues and

By continuously observing each new found answer and reviewing it and all other previous ones before, it will then prove that the truths found are infallible. Through this process of enumeration, each part is rechecked and no mistakes are made; and thus uncorrupted truth is obtained. Having proved that these methods work, Descartes would then use them to answer his original question. Proving that he was a real thing that was capable of thinking, he would then reason out that a God does exist. By understanding that he is a thinking thing, and this thinking thing in itself is perceived as the soul; is flawed. It is flawed because he doubted his perception of senses. He originally stated that because his senses are deceitful, they are then untrue; but through the understanding of,

“in order to think, it is necessary to exist, I judged that I could take as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true, but that there is merely some difficulty in properly discerning” (Descartes