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Descartes 'Meditation Of First Philosophy'

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In the Meditation of First Philosophy, Descartes’ search for knowledge starts with a claim of doubt. He doubts his senses, his body and everything he experienced. This essay will outline why Descartes doubted the existence of the external world, his body, and even the mathematical truths, as well as Descartes’ criterion for having knowledge, and how this criterion will lead him to doubt everything he had ever known. This essay will also illustrate Descartes’ method for arriving at his understanding of knowledge and examine his final belief that intellect is the source of knowledge. First of all, Descartes begin the Meditation by reflecting on the number of fallacies he had believed during his life and on the subsequent faultiness of the body of knowledge he had built up from these falsehoods. According to Descartes, “…it is some years now since I realized how many false opinions I had accepted as true from childhood onward… [it] could only be highly doubtful” (13). As a result of this realization, Descartes swept away all he knew to start again from the beginning, building up his knowledge on more solid foundation. Descartes did not want to list …show more content…

From knowing the existence of God, Descartes then went on to prove that the existence of the physical or the material world exist. In the fourth meditation Descartes explain why intellect is the source of knowledge. According to Descartes, the way to avoid error is to not judge until our intellect see the truth as clear and distinct. To Descartes, the body are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone (22). Descartes argues that Knowledge of the nature of reality is a result of ideas of the intellect. He believed that the only way to prove the existence of our conscious or the existence of our sense or even the existence of God is to have “… a great light in the

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