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Descartes Second Meditation Essay

1515 Words7 Pages

The Meditations are one of Descartes most important works. They consist of his views on sensory perception, God and Nature. He considers the problems of the sources and nature of knowledge; the validity of truth; the nature and destiny of man; the existence of god, and the creation of the universe. Of the six meditations, the third is the most important. In the third mediation Descartes proves the existence of God, which provides him the foundation for the remaining three meditations. In Descartes second meditation, he established that because he is a thinking being, he exists. In the third meditation, Descartes attempts to build upon this foundation by questioning whether or not anything exists outside of him. In order to do so, he must distinguish …show more content…

Descartes states that he has many ideas “ ideas of "God, corporeal and inanimate things, angels, animals, and finally other men like myself (p.92). He goes through each category and argues that aside from the idea of God, all his other ideas could originate from himself. Basically, he establishes that since he is a substance, with shape, size, and form, he contains as much formal reality as there is objective reality in any of his ideas. Only his idea of God contains more objective reality than he could possibly possess in actual form, since God is beyond shape, size and form. Descartes is now left with a single idea, which along with his theory of the existence of God must reveal an existence apart from his …show more content…

Descartes believes that one of the main qualities he sees God to have is perfection. He doesn't believe its possible to be created by several partial causes, for then he would have an idea, which possessed more objective reality than he contained formal reality. Therefore, through the cause and effect theory, something would have to be the cause of that objective reality, and that cause would have to exist outside of him. And it follows that such a cause must bring together all the characteristics and perfection's that belong to God, and thus would be

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