Descartes Meditations Summary

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Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings
The main goal of Descartes in Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings was to find the truth behind all of his beliefs in order to build a solid foundation of certainly and to focus his beliefs strictly on his idea of certainty; essentially to question knowledge. His beliefs are mainly based on the theory that if someone is confident about knowing something then they must be correct. Three key issues are being discussed throughout the book ; the existence of him being a thinking thing, our senses deceiving us, God as a supreme being, and being deceived by the Evil and Genius, as well as the idea that the body is an extension of the mind. Throughout reading all the meditations, discussing the cogito, …show more content…

“For dearly even painters when they try to imagine the most unusual sirens or satyrs, cannot assign natures to them which are completely new; rather they simply mix up the parts of different animals. Even if they happen to think up something so novel that nothing like it was ever seen before- so that it is therefore very dearly fictitious and false – nonetheless, at least the colors from which they paint it must surely be real.” (pg.20) They may fuse together different parts of bodies or images, but the simple parts such as shape, quantity, and size are in essence real or at least derived from the real things. So he reasons, that more tangible ideas (physics, astronomy, and medicine) are formed by simplex ideas (arithmetic and geometry) and can be …show more content…

For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three added together make five and a quadrilateral figure has no more than four sides. It seems impossible that one could ever suspect that such clear truth are false.” He believes that there’s no way these obvious truths are false. Descartes claims that the idea of God has been inside him forever and it must have been put by him in his creator. He begins to question whether God is a deceiver or not, but then again God is always said to be good, so it has to be something else that allows him to be deceived, not God because God doesn’t have any imperfections. Thus the idea of the evil genius is born, that this being is putting a lot of energy in misleading

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