Free First And Second Meditation Of The Book Rene Descartes Research Paper Sample

The Meditations usually reflected on as the foundation of the modern philosophy of the West. Descartes breaks down the Aristotelian opinion that the entire knowledge is achieved through the senses and that the state of the mind must bear a resemblance to what they are about. He builds up a completely perception of mind, substance and opinions. Descartes employs a lot of skepticism especially in the First Meditation. He starts by asking how he can be sure of anything. He then builds up all types of imaginative and strange reasons as to why he should doubt his senses. Since that time, Philosophy has been marked a regular skepticism in regard to knowledge arguments.
The First Meditation which is titled “What can be called into doubt”, starts with Descartes who is the mediator reflecting on the amount of lies he has believed all through his life. Descartes also reflects on the consequent faultiness of the body of facts he has constructed up from these lies. He makes his mind up to sweep away everything he thinks he is familiar with in order to begin again from the ground. He wants to start from the beginning so that he can build up his facts again on more certain foundations. He has placed himself alone, by the fire, without having any worries so that he can do away with his previous attitude with a lot of care.
Descartes thinks that he only requires searching for some reasons to doubt his current opinions with the intention of prompting him to look for steadier grounds for his knowledge. Instead of doubting all of his opinions alone, he reasons that he might shed all of them into doubt if he can distrust the grounds and basic principles on to which his attitude is established.
Everything that Descartes has agreed on as most true has appeared to discover from or through his senses. He admits that from time to time the senses can mislead. This is only with respect to objects that are quiet tiny or distant and the human being sensory knowledge is really strong. He admits that mad people might be more misled and that he is undoubtedly not one of them, and there is no need for him to worry about that.
On the other hand, Descartes understands that he is over and over again convinced when he is dreaming that he is sensing actual objects. He feels convinced that he is not asleep and that he is sitting by the fire. He mirrors that often he has had such a dream of this type of thing and has been entirely persuaded by it. Although his current sensations may be images from a dream, he proposes that even images from a dream are drawn from waking incident, similarly to paintings in that respect. For instance, once a painter builds an imaginary creature such as a mermaid, the complex parts are drawn from actual things. Once the person doing the painting creates something completely new, in any case, the colors applied in the painting are obtained from the actual experience. Therefore, Descartes concludes, even though he can doubt complex things, he is not able to doubt the straightforward and common parts from which they are built such as shape, amount and size. Descartes concludes that even though human beings can have doubts on studies based on complex things, such as physics and medicine, they cannot have doubts studies based on straightforward things such as geometry.
On another reflection, Descartes realizes that even those straightforward things can also be put into doubt. He says that the all-powerful God could make even people’s origin of mathematics false. He mentions that one might disagree that God is extremely good and would not guide him to trust falsely all of those things. By this way of thinking, people should think that God would never mislead him regarding anything; however, this is undoubtedly not true. Supposing God does not exist, then there would be even more possibility of being misled. This is because people inadequate senses would not have been built by an ideal being.
Descartes finds it almost not possible to maintain his usual opinions and guesses out of his head despite how much he tries. He makes his mind up to make believe that these opinions are completely not true, and they are imaginary in order to offset his usual way of thinking. He presumes that it is not God who misleads, but some demonic evil that has devoted itself in order to deceive him such that everything he gives a thought he gets aware it is false.
In the Second Meditation Descartes talks of the nature of human being and the reason why it is better known than body. He reflects on the significance of his previous activity, and that he is determined to find conviction by reducing any knowledge that is simply possible. The Aristotelian notion of the mind divides intellection and knowledge as characteristics of a soul that endure death. Connected to the sensory world are such feelings, such as imagining, willing and sensing and are hence different in accordance with Aristotle. According to Cartesian notion of mind, there is a great difference between the mind and the world. This is where things such as sensing could occur in dreams or spiritual minds and are regarded as mental activities and only exist as reality in the mind.
Objects such as trees and waves are completely disconnected from things in mind, and turn out to be a chief concern, for present philosophy to establish how the two of them connect. For example, there are a lot of connection visual sensations and things in the world; it is very hard to establish what is the connection is.
The remaining part of the Second Meditation focuses on the argument on wax within which Descartes anticipates to reveal distinctly. He wants to show the humans get to know things through the mind rather than through the senses, and humans are of the mind more than anything else. On his argument, he concentrates on the procedure of change by which hard wax liquefies to a liquid paddle. The senses give the impression of things about the world and Descartes agrees that humans know about the hard piece of wax via the senses, but the senses cannot be able to tell that the hard wax and the liquefied wax are one thing. He argues that only the mind can manage and make sense on what humans see. The senses see only a separate mixture of information, but the mind is what assists to understand it.
The argument is once again a move in opposition to the Aristotelian theory of understanding which implies that the entire knowledge comes from the senses. Descartes admits that the senses notifies humans about the world, but emphasizes that the senses only manages to give jumbled information. Therefore, he situates himself steadily in the rationalist camp where as the empiricist, for instance, Aristotle goes for a sense founded theory of knowledge.
Descartes attempts to describe what precisely this ‘I’ that exists is. The first explanation is a ‘man’, which he refers to as a ‘rational animal’. In order for him, to get the answer of what ‘I’ is, he thinks of everything that came into his mind when he first thought of the question. He first thinks that he has a body, which he states “That I had a face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure of limbs which can be seen in a corpse” (Meditation I). He characterizes ‘I’ as nourishment, motion, way of thinking and sensitivity. He points these to the soul and pictures this to be made of some vague such as wind or other which fill his body.
This argument is reasonable if he implies that the reality of the mind is well known than the reality of the body, but it appears that he wants to show that existence of the mind is much better than the nature of the body. Descartes says that he very well know that there is the existence of the mind, but he is familiar with the mind than he is with the world outside his mind. He is not as clear as many people would want him to be especially on what and how new notion makes the mind better acknowledged than the body.