Descartes First Philosophy Analysis

Berke Ağababaoğlu

Zeynep Direk

Phil 101

26.01.2017

Understanding Meditations on First Philosophy Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical text ,which is written by René Descartes. The tone of writing is very sincere, it almost feels like Descartes is talking to readers. In the text, he talks about his doubts and his examination about his existence, the outer world and god. He uses modern skepticism and methodological doubt as a tool. The text, contains six meditations each of them concerns about different subjects but they complement each other. One could not think one without the others. Descartes’s arguments grows cumulatively. The first meditation prepare the ground for other meditations, it get rid of everything to get to the

He says he is going to continue to question until he founds something certain and he gives an example from, Archimedes who says, one only needs one immovable point to move whole earth. He removes everything from his consideration, removes the body and his senses. He shouldn’t exist without his senses and body but that is not the case. He exist because there must be an “I” that doubts and being deceived by the evil genius. He continue to question what this “I” is. He argues that this “I” could be a lot of things, it could be a man, it could be a animal but the composite definitions are harder because for example, for Descartes to explain “I” as a thinking animal, he needs to explain what animal is. He chooses a simple way, says that “I” is a thinking thing. He says his famous words, but not in a traditional way, “I am, I exist”. Moreover, he claims that he has mental images about the external world and explains how he gets those images when he doesn’t have a body or senses. He is a thinking thing, which has an ability to form mental images, and gain wisdom about the outer world through senses. But since, he assumes that he is in a dream all of his senses are falsified so, he just thinks that he sense those things and concludes that sensing is just thinking. He later continue with the physical objects and their reality, he takes a wax as an example because taking a general concept

He knows he understands the true nature of external world with his mind not with his senses. Everything in the outside world is an idea, a thought in his mind. But he cant prove the existence of the external world yet because, he believe arithmetic and geometry are also certain which are products of human mind. Even they could be wrong since there might be a evil god who is trying to deceive him. He can be sure that he exists but he cant trust his mind before he proves that the God is not decieving him. In order to do that, he called the ideas modes of thoughts and classifies them in three categories. First one is the innate ideas which are there since we were born, second one is the adventitious ideas which comes from the sense experience, and the third one is the ideas which are invented by us. First, he concerned about the adventitious ideas, he says that he can not prevent them from coming to his mind. Even if he doesn’t want to feel hot near the fire he still feel the fire so the source that these ideas came must transmit its own likeness not something