First Essay Assignment Question: Meditation on First Philosophy

First Essay Assignment Question: Meditation on First Philosophy

First Essay Assignment Question: Meditation on First Philosophy

It can be seen that Descartes Meditations on first philosophy raised a lot of questions regarding the existence and nature of the self, the existence of God, the nature of truth and the possibility of error, and finally also the essence and existence of bodies along other things. Descartes did all this through the medium of his six meditations.

Descartes from his very first Meditation, that of concerning things that can be called in to doubt, gives reasons on why we should doubt all things, material or non-material, to be not true. He further goes on to state that, we must continue to doubt these things as being not true as long as we have no other reason to believe in their existence, except for the scientific basis on which those things may have been founded or are rather based upon. Descartes starts off by saying that a person's basic senses, meaning that his/her sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight will each at least prove to be deceptive to them once in their lifetime. From this Descartes concurs that you can't trust your senses since if they have deceived you once, what are the chances that they won't deceive you again. Even though Descartes states that one shouldn't trust his senses all the time, how ever when it comes to deriving the existence of small and distinct things, one also according to Descartes can not deny the existence of those very senses. Descartes during his first meditation also comes to the conclusion that the eyes, head and hands and the whole body of a human being in general are not imaginary things. This is due to the fact that according to Descartes, things seen during dreams "like painted images could not have only been produced in the likeness of true things" (Descartes, 28). Descartes even takes this a step further by stating that a painter's artistic representation is merely a product that is composed of the painter's already existing thoughts & his knowledge of certain things in general. Hence Descartes comes to the conclusion that subjects and topics like "arithmetic, geometry and drawing which treat of nothing but the simplest and the most general thing which are indifferent as to whether these things do or do not in fact exist, contain something certain and indubitable", (Descartes, 29), such as the colours in the painters drawing in the example presented above. Finally, since Descartes by the end