Descartes
Is our education complete once a degree has been earned? Have we learned all there is to know? Can we be sure of what we have come to know? Only a completely self-assured person might answer yes to these questions, but for Rene Descartes (1596-1650) the completion of his formal education left him feeling and thinking he was still ignorant about the certainties of human experience and existence. This prominent Renaissance philosopher conquered the world of uncertainty in a work written in the 17th century. Mr. Descartes', Discourse on Method, quelled the skeptics with the assertion, "I think, therefore I am". Most important to Descartes, however, was the method for which he was able to arrive at this axiom. The philosopher, Descartes, hoped to establish a universal method, a tremendous goal, if achieved.
The Renaissance era cultivated rational thought, science, and mathematics as the eminent forms of seeking knowledge. The working definition of knowledge that he uses is knowledge, which is unchanging, stable through time. Descartes was a man of his culture and his times. The method Mr. Descartes sought would have to be inclusive of a rational methodology. Influential to Mr. Descartes methodology was mathematics. The rational process of mathematics revealed certain axioms. His goal was to achieve a universal methodology to attain or know certain truths. Seeking a universal methodology was a very ambitious undertaking, because universal means that which is true for all men at all times. Thus, Rene Descartes was involved in a challenging pursuit.
Mr. Descartes method was established upon the foundation of four rules, a type of mathematical model for the acquisition of self-evident truths. Following...
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...Descartes revealed to us that upon further reflection he ascertained another axiom the existence of God. He reasoned that the state of doubting ourselves must occur because we are comparing ourselves to an existent perfection and by this perfection we mean God. God placed this idea (conception) of the ideal within all men. The Metaphysical Doctrine hoped to establish a forward-thinking philosophy where skepticism was declined and a rational, positive thought was revolutionized. We must ask, did Descartes create a universal method for achieving truth, knowledge? -No. However, Descartes philosophy was critical to our perspective upon the world as human beings. As the founder of modern thought Descartes' philosophy increased the value of the individual against the dominant role of the Church. The Medieval period had fallen and a far-reaching era had begun.
René Descartes signifies a unique change compared to ancient and medieval traditions in many ways. The ancient and medieval traditions consist of ideals of which people impose meaning on things. These classical traditions also consist of how a person identity starts from outside of the body and the works its way inwards towards a complete person. Those traditions had a perception that humans began to analyzes themselves outside of themselves first before they analyze themselves internally. Descartes challenged the ancient and medieval traditions by having a different perception of how he came to know things. Descartes, instead of imposing meaning on things, he would derive meaning from things. He also challenged the classical traditions because
Baird and Kaufmann, the editors of our text, explain in their outline of Descartes' epistemology that the method by which the thinker carried out his philosophical work involved first discovering and being sure of a certainty, and then, from that certainty, reasoning what else it meant one could be sure of. He would admit nothing without being absolutely satisfied on his own (i.e., without being told so by others) that it was incontrovertible truth. This system was unique, according to the editors, in part because Descartes was not afraid to face doubt. Despite the fact that it was precisely doubt of which he was endeavoring to rid himself, he nonetheless allowed it the full reign it deserved and demanded over his intellectual labors. "Although uncertainty and doubt were the enemies," say Baird and Kaufmann (p.16), "Descartes hit upon the idea of using doubt as a tool or as a weapon. . . . He would use doubt as an acid to pour over every 'truth' to see if there was anything that could not be dissolved . . . ." This test, they explain, resulted for Descartes in the conclusion that, if he doubted everything in the world there was to doubt, it was still then certain that he was doubting; further, that in order to doubt, he had to exist. His own existence, therefore, was the first truth he could admit to with certainty, and it became the basis for the remainder of his epistemology.
Rene Descartes was a French Philosopher, and is often referred to as “The Father of Modern Philosophy”. According to Descartes it is useless to claim something is real unless we understand how a claim could be known as justifiable belief. To say our beliefs are justified we have to base them of a belief that is itself indubitable (impossible to doubt). Descartes states that a belief that is indubitable provides a foundation in which all beliefs can be grounded from.
Descartes asserts knowledge is done through experimentation using a scientifc method to removing opinions, and come up with a solution to conflicts. In the Discourse on Method, Descartes describes his unique style of reasoning, and makes clear that his main goal for writing is to solve epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. Similar to Socrates, Descartes sensory perceptions cause a false belief in the world around us, he believes one needs to be thinking on the intelligible level, however Descartes provides a different method to achieving this goal.
In his work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes narrates the search for certainty in order to recreate all knowledge. He begins with “radical doubt.” He asks a simple question “Is there any one thing of which we can be absolutely certain?” that provides the main question of his analysis. Proceeding forward, he states that the ground of his foundation is the self – evident knowledge of the “thinking thing,” which he himself is.
He has two forms of ideas; formal reality which he perceived as the kind of reality that really exists and objective reality which is reality as seen in ideas. According to Descartes, our union among our ideas hold true only when they correlate to how the world actually is. Therefore, the true reality depends on h...
Descartes main objective in his meditations is to question or doubt knowledge and for him, in order to get an unbiased knowledge; he basically started from zero and questioned everything. He uses radical form of skepticism in his investigation for the absolute truth. I think that Descartes wrote the meditations to reaffirm his beliefs and/or to justify his beliefs. Most of the ideas that he tried to prove where based on the existence of god. Rene Descartes was a devout catholic and being one of the key figures in the scientific revolution, I think he had conflicting thoughts about what he believes and tried to prove his beliefs with the Meditations.
Although philosophy rarely alters its direction and mood with sudden swings, there are times when its new concerns and emphases clearly separate it from its immediate past. Such was the case with seventeenth-century Continental rationalism, whose founder was Rene Descartes and whose new program initiated what is called modern philosophy. In a sense, much of what the Continental rationalists set out to do had already been attempted by the medieval philosophers and by Bacon and Hobbes. But Descartes and Leibniz fashioned a new ideal for philosophy. Influenced by the progress and success of science and mathematics, their new program was an attempt to provide philosophy with the exactness of mathematics. They set out to formulate clear and rational principles that could be organized into a system of truths from which accurate information about the world could be deduced. Their emphasis was upon the rational ability of the human mind, which they now considered the source of truth both about man and about the world. Even though they did not reject the claims of religion, they did consider philosophical reasoning something different than supernatural revelation. They saw little value in feeling and enthusiasm as means for discovering truth, but they did believe that the mind of an individual is structured in such a way that simply by operating according to the appropriate method it can discover the nature of the universe. The rationalists assumed that what they could think clearly with their minds did in fact exist in the world outside their minds. Descartes and Leibniz even argued that certain ideas are innate in the human mind, that, given the proper occasion, experience would cause...
The teaching of Descartes has influenced many minds since his writings. Descartes' belief that clear and distinct perceptions come from the intellect and not the senses was critical to his ultimate goal in Meditations on First Philosophy, for now he has successfully created a foundation of true and certain facts on which to base a sold, scientific belief structure. He has proven himself to exist in some form, to think and therefore feel, and explains how he knows objects or concepts to be real.
Through Descartes’s Meditations, he sought to reconstruct his life and the beliefs he had. He wanted to end up with beliefs that were completely justified and conclusively proven. In order to obtain his goal, Descartes had to doubt all of his foundational beliefs so that he could start over. This left Descartes doubting the reality of the world around him and even his own existence. In order to build up to new conclusively proven and justified true beliefs, Descartes needed a fixed and undeniable starting point. This starting point was his cogito, “I think, therefore I am.” In this paper I will argue that Descartes’s argument that he is definite of his own existence, is unsound.
Descartes’ method is ultimately about finding the truth within yourself. He says that there are two types of people that would not benefit from his method: those who think they know more than they do and who lack the patience for such careful work, and those who are modest enough to think that they are more capable of finding out the truth if they follow a teacher. Descartes also creates a three to four maxim moral code to guide his behavior while he experiences his period...
Rene Descartes decision to shatter the molds of traditional thinking is still talked about today. He is regarded as an influential abstract thinker; and some of his main ideas are still talked about by philosophers all over the world. While he wrote the "Meditations", he secluded himself from the outside world for a length of time, basically tore up his conventional thinking; and tried to come to some conclusion as to what was actually true and existing. In order to show that the sciences rest on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the senses, Descartes must begin by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to him by the senses. This is done in the first of six different steps that he named "Meditations" because of the state of mind he was in while he was contemplating all these different ideas. His six meditations are "One:Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", "Two:Concerning the Nature of the Human mind: that it is better known than the Body", "Three: Concerning God, that he exists", "Four: Concerning the True and the False", "Five: Concerning the Essence of Material things, and again concerning God, that he exists" and finally "Six: Concerning the Existence of Material things, and the real distinction between Mind and Body". Although all of these meditations are relevant and necessary to understand the complete work as a whole, the focus of this paper will be the first meditation.
Descartes' philosophy was an attempt to create a genuine foundation upon which further scientific developments would be established. His devotion to math's methodic nature and invariability lead him to apply these concepts to all other ideas. He hypothesized that "those propositions which one could come to understand completely would be self evident, since one's knowledge about them would not depend upon knowledge of any other propositions; therefore they were suitable to stand as fundamental assumptions, to be the starting points from which other propositions could be deduced" (Walting).
...ll true knowledge is solely knowledge of the self, its existence, and relation to reality. René Descartes' approach to the theory of knowledge plays a prominent role in shaping the agenda of early modern philosophy. It continues to affect (some would say "infect") the way problems in epistemology are conceived today. Students of philosophy (in his own day, and in the history since) have found the distinctive features of his epistemology to be at once attractive and troubling; features such as the emphasis on method, the role of epistemic foundations, the conception of the doubtful as contrasting with the warranted, the skeptical arguments of the First Meditation, and the cogito ergo sum--to mention just a few that we shall consider. Depending on context, Descartes thinks that different standards of warrant are appropriate. The context for which he is most famous, and on which the present treatment will focus, is that of investigating First Philosophy. The first-ness of First Philosophy is (as Descartes conceives it) one of epistemic priority, referring to the matters one must "first" confront if one is to succeed in acquiring systematic and expansive knowledge.
We can apply Rene Descartes philosophy to our everyday lives because we can make a difference. We can analyze what we do in our daily lives and we can make a difference finding the truth about life. I personally like the philosophy of Rene Descartes even though his philosophy is considered to be epistemological and it has zero ground. His philosophy can help our community by making us look at reality in a different way. Even if his philosophy is considered to be irrational, we should take in mind what he mediated in his meditation