Rene Descartes Meditation On First Philosphy Summary

In Meditations On First Philosphy, Rene Descartes sets out to discover what is essentially the Truths of knowledge. By the end of the First and Second Meditations, we learn that he brings all his beliefs into doubt; even considering that God was a malicious demon who purposely set out to deceive us in every way, including things we perceive as clear and true, such as arithmetic and geometry. By the 3rd Meditation, the only thing he can truly be sure of is that he is a “thing that thinks”, regardless if he’s being deceived or not, simply because of the fact that he has the ability to doubt himself, described through the line “I think, therefore I am.” In the following essay, I shall discuss Descartes’ First Proof on the Existence of God, its

Descartes concern with formal reality has three distinct hierarchies: infinite substance, finite substance, and modes, where the reality of the finite depends on the reality on the infinite, but the reverse however is not true. He describes how there are three types of ideas: innate, self-made, and adventitious, the latter Descartes uses for his first argument. Descartes first argument for God’s existence stems from the fact that he has the idea of God, an all-powerful, infinite, benevolent and perfect being. He being imperfect and finite could not have conceived this idea, and thus requires a cause. That cause must either possess itself in the effect or must exist at least in equal reality with its effect, which includes both formal and objective reality. Descartes concludes that this idea was something he was born innately with from God as represented through, “as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his

A discussion of Descartes’ First Proof of God and the problem of the malicious demon both plagued his mind, But, that doesn’t necessarily mean Descartes is wrong. His argument is extremely well constructed and coherent, however it is slightly flawed in his logic when trying to prove that any finite cause must regress back to an eventual infinite point or cause, in this case, God being the ultimate cause. Descartes believes Unity is one of the attributes of God, and I agree with this. Although I do say it is slightly flawed, I do challenge someone to try to prove that there is some other cause other than God, not for religious faith, but in the sense that if the Universe is inclined to disorder or entropy, then there must also be some other finite cause that caused this, with the regress ultimately being an infinite cause. Why is that? The idea that if the universe did not form and continue to change through entropy, then how did it arrive? How can something with disorder stem from something more disordered, if God isn’t the perfect, unifying origin ? Something cannot arise from nothing, there must be a cause. As “thinking things”, all of our ideas are modes, and all ideas to an extent, have some level of formal reality; I have an innate idea of God, therefore the idea of God also has a formal