An Examination of the Second Meditation of Descartes :: Essays Papers

An Examination of the encourage Meditation of DescartesBaird and Kaufmann, the editors of our text, explain in their outline of Descartes epistemology that the method by which the judgement carried out his philosophical work involved number 1 discovering and macrocosm accepted of a certainty, and then, from that certainty, reasoning what else it meant one could be sure of. He would harbour 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 break-dance because Descartes was not afraid to face discredit. Despite the fact that it was precisely doubt of which he was endeavoring to rid himself, he nonetheless totallyowed it the full reign it be and demanded over his intellectual labors. Although uncertainty and doubt were the enemies, say Baird and Kaufmann (p.16), Descartes hit upon the sentiment of using doubt as a tool or as a weapon. . . . He w ould use doubt as an acid to decant over every truth to see if there was anything that could not be dissolve . . . . This test, they explain, resulted for Descartes in the conclusion that, if he doubted everything in the world there was to doubt, it was dummy up 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 goal of his epistemology.In his Synopsis of the Following Six Meditations, Descartes writes the longest paragraph by far on the Second Meditation. This is hardly surprising, since it is the one most deprecative to his methodology -- the one without which, his entire system of reasoning would collapse. In the first sentence of it, he presents scarce that conclusion which, as we deliver however seen, Baird and Kaufmann discussed In the Second Meditation, he says (p. 23), the mind uses its own freedom and supposes the non-ex istence of all things about whose existence it can have even the slightest doubt and in so doing the mind notices that it is impossible that it should not itself exist during this time. He goes on to say that this will enable the mind to distinguish itself from the body. At this layer he spends a good deal of space speaking of exactly why he will not attempt to prove the immortality of the nous in this section, though perhaps some of his audience might have expected him to.