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Descartes Argument From Senssibility Of A Deceitful God

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In Descartes’ First Meditation, Descartes is trying to establish firm foundations for knowledge; in doing so he adopts ‘The Method of Doubt’ where he tests knowledge by subjecting them to sceptical arguments. There are three main arguments considered by Descartes in the First Meditation, ‘The Argument from Sensory Error’, ‘The Argument from Dreaming’, and ‘The Argument from the Possibility of a Deceitful God’. In Descartes’ ‘Argument from Sensory Error’, he says “Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my sense. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once”. Descartes’ premise is that his senses have sometimes deceived him, …show more content…

The first premise is that it may seem to me that I may be at the library writing my philosophy essay, the second premise is that everything might seem exactly as though I am at the library writing my philosophy essay if I was asleep in bed dreaming it. The third premise, presupposed by Descartes’ principle is that while it seems to me that I am in situation P, but I also know that everything could seem to be exactly the same if I were in a different situation (Q), therefore I can not be sure that I am really in situation P. A challenge to this argument is that we make no real judgements in dreams, therefore we cannot be deceived, however Descartes replies that he has genuinely been deceived in a dream before. Descartes acknowledges that the ‘Argument from Dreaming’ casts doubts to many knowledge claims, including doubts on existence, location, or properties of material objects. Therefore, Descartes’ argument from dreaming supposes that a posteriori knowledge is doubtful, but there is no doubt shown about a priori knowledge. Descartes expresses this by saying “whether I am awake or asleep, two plus three makes five, and a square only has four sides. It seems impossible to suspect that such obvious truths might be

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“Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once” (Descartes). By this, he means that our perceptions are deceptions created by our senses to trick us into believing that we are awake and going about our day when in actuality, we are dreaming and the world around us is an illusion. Hence, we shouldn’t trust our senses to give us any true knowledge of the world because it may always be deceiving us. It is true that senses can deceive, however, for us to know that our senses are deceiving us, we must differentiate between reality and what is deception.

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Descartes begins his argument by comparing the dreams he could have to the dreams of a madman. He says he has similar experiences as one would except of a madman why asleep, if even sometimes more outlandish ones (Descartes, 13). He goes on to describe how his dreams in the past contained events that are hardly different from the time he considered himself to be awake. Theses help to support the claim that there is no way to tell whether or not he is dreaming or awake. This defines Descartes’ first premise to be “If you cannot distinguish between the time when you are dreaming and the time when you are awake using the sense, then the sense can be doubted.

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We know clear and distinct perceptions independently by God, and his existence provides us with a certainty we might not possess otherwise. However, another possible strategy would be to change Gods role in Descartes philosophy. Instead of seeing God as the validation of clear and distinct perceptions, rather see him as a safeguard against doubt. This strategy, however, is a problem since it re-constructs the Meditations – Philosophical work of Descartes –.This is because it would not be God, who is the ultimate foundation of knowledge, but the clear and distinct

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5. Why can’t an evil deceiver deceive Descartes about his belief that he thinks? He sees that he can be certain that he exists and that he thinks because even if an evil genius is doing everything possible to deceive Descartes, it can 't deceive him into believing he doesn 't exist. In order for something to be deceived, it must at least exist. Then, Descartes comes up with a rule which allows him 6.

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