Descartes Forms And Ideas

Alanna Ryan
Professor Gauker
PHIL1001-001
28 January 2014
Forms vs. Ideas
A man whose ideas and perceptions of his time shocked many and he is considered the father of modern philosophy. His views and understanding of the world could be seen to many as radical, as he set out to understand himself and the nature of ideas and existence. His goal in writing the Meditations on First Philosophy written in 1641 was to show the clarity and distinction of ideas through the existence and immortality of God. This man, named Rene Descartes, had to place himself in the shoes of doubt, seen in meditation I. His doubts consisted of the senses in their original distinction such as a square book or a soft blanket and senses in seemingly apparent distinction which Descartes argues about when one dreams. He states that even the most vivid senses in our dreams could be subject to doubt.
There was one thing that Descartes knew for certain, he existed. If Descartes was able to think, then he existed, which comes from one of his most famous quotes, “I think; therefore I am.” He knew that since he existed, he could not have created himself, so something else had to have created his existence. He believed that one could go down the line and keep asking what caused that person to exist and so on until eventually ending with an infinite self-causing being, which is God. He used this notion of an existing God to prove his distinction of ideas.
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...

... middle of paper ...

... one can conclude an “idea” about a diamond and that it is hard. So, if there is a diamond on a faraway planet, we make our idea that the diamond is hard from examining the properties of the other diamonds. If there was no falsity to say that the diamond on the faraway planet was soft, why and how would the diamond with an already set knowledge of its characteristics suddenly be soft?
In Peirce’s defense, an idea may be clear without being true in rare and extreme cases but if this is how we lived by when thinking, no one would have a clear and distinct idea because it would always be “untrue”. The diamond on the faraway planet with the evidence of the characteristics of other diamonds would be hard just like the rest, therefore, having a clear and distinct idea of the properties of a diamond, being able to avoid his view that it will never be tested for hardness.