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Descartes First Meditation Analysis

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Meditation is the introspective process that involves the mind turning back in and upon itself, removing itself from the material world and focusing its attention inward. Descartes employs meditation to detach the minds from external influences, to think and analyze philosophy from the original foundations. This brings us to Descartes First Meditation, with the introduction of the method of doubt, he presents his philosophical project and claims that in order to complete his project he needs to question the truth behind all his beliefs. He attempts to accomplish this impossible feat because as he’s aged he has realized the false foundations that he has held onto thus far and the ideas he’s built on them. To be able to tear down these beliefs, …show more content…

The idea that if one can comprehend something in a dream, it therefore must exist in real life. The fact of this is that we know no positive transition between our dream state and the state of reality, and since dreams are so similar to reality, one can never tell when they are truly dreaming. Descartes demonstrates this idea with his own experiences, “How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events-that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire – when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet at the moment my eyes are certainly awake” (Descartes 145). By using simple experiences like these Descartes is able to emphasize that when a person is dreaming, they do not usually know they are dreaming, and the sensations they experience are as real as if they were awake. However, they are not actually happening to the dreaming person in the formal reality. This understanding leads us to believe our senses can deceive us any time and that we can not rely on them to question the reality of something. As for finding an objective truth, that is stable and likely to last, upon which he can base his philosophy (Descartes 144), Descartes must refute all experiences that have a basis in the bodily …show more content…

Descartes makes the Evil Demon argument to neither prove the existence of such a demon or construct a better understanding of this source of deceit. But rather to destroy the foundations in which he has built all his bias on and rebuild his knowledge from scratch. It works to make us speculate everything while doubting the beliefs and senses we hold so true. This never-ending doubt gives rise to a new question, how do I know that I even

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“How do I know that I am not dreaming” is one of the main questions that Descartes brings afloat in the dream argument. He wants to know how can it be possible to prove that he is not dreaming while he is seating and holding his piece of paper, and this is what creates a skeptic argument about his perceptual beliefs. In effect, the dream argument is powerful because it depicts how the senses may deceive us while putting into question if it is possible to know what is real and what is not. In fact, it is very sufficient to produce uncertainties about waking experiences. As Descartes poses it in the in the First Meditation, “…I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality

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1111 Words | 5 Pages

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What Is Rene Descartes Dream Argument

685 Words | 3 Pages

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166 Words | 1 Pages

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722 Words | 3 Pages

The importance of the wax argument in Descartes meditations go further than explaining the possibility of a mental faculty that allows the body to perceive nature and natural phenomenon.. By so doing, the wax argument as presented allows an individual to create doubt in their mind about their existence or the existence of any other matter. He had doubts about his senses but he discovered that there was a reason to doubt his senses. The purpose of his argument was to create doubt.

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