Examples Of Descartes 'Method Of Doubt In Meditations'

The first person to base his philosophy on the idea that our senses can deceive us was Descartes. Descartes believed that if we can’t always trust our innate senses, why should we trust them at all? He asked these questions because he was interested by the projects of extending knowledge and understanding of the world. The way in which he does this is by doubting everything and anything. This is known as “the method of doubt” which he describes in his book Meditations. Even though Descartes did this experiment to prove that even if we start from the strongest possible sceptical position, doubting everything, we can still reach knowledge. However, many philosophers after him used his ‘method of doubt’ to argue that we can have no perceptual

Unlike Plato, Descartes does not reject all sense experience but he says that we need to avoid believing all things that are not entirely certain. “ It is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” In order to succeed with his scepticism and doubt, he had to start fresh with a tabula rasa. He did this by going through three waves of

It is an unusual thought that we are being controlled by demons. Even though science can explain optical illusions, you cannot get rid of the fact that we might be controlled by demons. And as shown in the arguments against scepticism, it is nearly impossible to disprove those who disapprove and doubt everything. Descartes concluded at the end of his waves of doubts that there is one thing that we can be sure of, that we are thinking or ‘cogito ergo sum.’ The fact that we are thinking and have knowledge of the fact that we are thinking means that we doubt scepticism’s probability of being true because scepticism only brings to our attention that we have to accept that there is a chance, whatever the numerical value, that there is no external world in which we can perceive. And that is what we have to take it into consideration when we talk about epistemology because the fact that our senses deceive us does indeed mean that possibly don’t have perceptual