Lack Of Knowledge In Descartes Meditations

If we were to forget everything we knew and start over from scratch, what would our lives be like? Imagine if we were somehow able to forget everything we know about math, the English language, and even trivial knowledge like the layout of the Lewis center. In Descartes Meditations, Descartes makes the odd decision to doubt everything he has learned so far. His goal through this “erasing” of all his knowledge is to sort out what’s true and what’s false. Through these meditations, he is attempting to prove whether both material objects and ideas actually exist in our world, and after long periods of meditation, he seems to come to the conclusion that ideas can be trusted more easily than the physical objects we see in our world. In the first meditation, Descartes decides to test his knowledge by attacking the very basis of everything he knows. He recognizes the fact that it would take too much time to test every single fact he has ever

On page 48, he states “Physics, Astronomy, Medicine and all other sciences which have as their end the consideration of composite things, are very dubious and uncertain” (Meditations 48). This quote basically sums up his belief that whole and composite things are hard to believe in, and this because these composite things themselves are made up of smaller and individual parts. To Descartes, subjects like Math consist of using basic concepts to prove more advance topics, and these basic ideas are what can be proven. For example, the math problem 1+1 would always equal to 2, and that this level of certainty is what makes the idea of Math more realistic than other things. Even though he does admit that subjects like Math may still carry some amount of uncertainty with them, Descartes remains firm in his belief that some basic principles remain