Greek mathematician Archimedes is meant to have claimed that he could lift the Earth off its foundation if he were given a place to stand, one solid point, and a long enough lever. French philosopher René Descartes takes up a similar mindset and is convinced, that if he finds one foundational belief that is completely indubitable and infallible, he could achieve great things. It would not be too much to say that Descartes has accomplished the same thing via his work in “Meditations on First Philosophy”. In the Second Meditation, Descartes arrives at the self-justifying basic belief, also known as the famous ‘cogito’ argument – “I think, therefore I am”. Additionally, Descartes examines the nature of the mind and claims that the mind is better known to us than the body. I shall argue that the arguments in the Second Meditation are genuine and well thought out.
In the First
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First, it was Aristotle who famously described man as a rational animal and Descartes is predisposed against the Scholastic tradition, which closely follows Aristotle’s thinking. Brandhorst also indicates that Descartes is concerned with answers to questions of the family ‘what am I?’ Aristotle’s taxonomy, however, is based on the principle relation of genus to species. For Descartes, this Aristotelian approach does not do justice to the question ‘what am I?’ as the ‘I’ cannot be classified under general categories. Thus, no answer that appeals to the genus-species relation will satisfy the demands of thinking the subject itself. This approach both blocks the Scholastic tendency toward definition and is attractive to a philosophy that wants to take seriously the question of