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Summary: Excerpts From The Meditations Of The First Philosophy

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LACUESTA, Lorraine L. 2LM2
2014063322 October 16, 2015

Digest: Excerpts from the Meditations of the First Philosophy (1641) by René Descartes
 Everything I perceive is Fictitious
 Descartes found something certain: He is certain that there is no certainty
 Memory tells nothing but lies
 Illusions: Body, shape, extension, movement, and place
 Thoughts could possibly done by:
 God(?)
4 Supremely powerful and cunning deceiver
4 gives thoughts (illusions)
 Self(?)
4 Makes the self “something”
4 Undoubtedly EXIST
 “I” Exist
 What it is?
 Risk of confusing it with something else
 To avoid confusion, need to go back to the beliefs Descartes believe before starting the meditation
 Descartes thought he was a Man: What …show more content…

4 Each question lead to harder questions, it would take more time than Descartes can spare
 Focus on the beliefs that naturally came to the mind:
 Body
4 Face, hands, arms
4 Whole structure of body parts
 Soul
4 Eat, drink, move
4 Sense-persception and thinking
 Soul and Body
 Soul
 Thin and filmy
 Like a wind or fire or ether
4 Flowing or spreading in the solid parts
 Body
 Definite shape and position
 Can occupy a “region of space” to avoid other body
 Senses: Perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell
 Movement
 Reaction: can’t start up by itself unless moved by other things bump into it
 “Human Ones”: could initiate movements & can be able to sense and think
 One needs a body to perceive: perceive things through thinking
 Thinking Man
 Can’t be separated from “I”
 Stop THINKING, Stop EXISTING
 A thing that THINKS, therefore EXIST:
 Doubts almost everything
 Understands some things
 Affirms that “I” exist and think
 Denies everything else
 Wants to know more
 Refuses to be deceived
 Imagines many things involuntarily
 Aware of others through the senses
 “I”: Thinking thing
 I doubt, I understand : want is obvious
 The I who imagines about I : same “I”
 I who become aware of bodily things through senses: sensing

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