Doubt In Rene Descarte's Meditation

In Paragraph 11 of Rene Descartes’s Meditation I, he summarizes and reiterates the reasons for his doubt and the method he employs to build the foundation of knowledge. He also examines the rationale of his doubt and the extent to which he will sustain this doubtful attitude. First he explains the reasons of his doubt. He claims that opinions have constantly reverberated back to his mind against his will. Since these opinions have shaped him through time and traditions, he is not habituated to resist the desire to assent to these opinions. He is in an psychological dilemma in which he cannot doubt certain propositions, for they are “highly probable,” but he wonders at the same time, if he ought to doubt these beliefs, for they are “slightly

He claims that his doubt is reasonable on the theoretical level, and his radical doubt will not impede him from practical life, since he is only consider the question of epistemology. In other words, his skeptical method does not concern local issues or physical matters in the external world, but only with abstract, general truths, whose validity is not dependent upon “whether they are actually existent or not” (Descartes, trans. Haldane I-7). Indeed, Descartes’ method of doubt is revolutionary in the sense that the uses doubt as a tool to search for a general, firm, and universal principle that serves as the basis of knowledge and an antidote for skepticism. The method he invented — the radical and methodical doubt —is a reproducible model for demarcation between subjective opinions and objective truths. However, not only is the application of his method of radical doubt unfeasible, but his insistence on the “purity” of knowledge as sciences that are certain, indubitable and, independent of the existence of corporeal things is also questionable. First, Descartes assumes that he is capable of detaching himself from all of his opinions. However, his theory is both practically unfeasible and theoretically inapplicable, for as long as one is situated in the world, what he thinks cannot