One of the main things that Descartes doubts is the senses, although he does not say that we should now forever ignore the senses, but rather just suspend judgement on them. He wishes to challenge

Therefore, the method of doubt uses scepticism as a tool to gain pure knowledge which is indubitable. There are many reasons for this, for example to gain a better understanding of the world and ourselves, to bring a new rigour to our thought processes and to arrive at a place where it is not possible to doubt any of our newly discovered knowledge. The task which Descartes sets is very difficult to achieve as, to get to a point of doubting everything we experience physically and even things which we think are certain, such as mathematics, mean we must doubt all we have to go on. Descartes himself says at the end of the First Meditation that he finds it very hard to doubt all of these things and that he is brought back to ‘normal life’ (Cottingham, 1986, p. 14) by his laziness. This suggests that not even he believes in the paradox which he set out when he said that sense perception cannot give us any knowledge of the world we live in. In the end there is one thing which we can be certain of: however much we are deceived, we must be here, i.e. exist, to experience the illusion, so we can at least be sure that we exist.

The extent to which Descartes is a foundationalist shows one of the main reasons for the method of doubt. As already mentioned, he thinks that even the most basic parts of his thought processes are things which can be called into doubt even in very small ways. Therefore, if even these basic principles can be doubted the more complex parts of his thought which rest on them are at risk of being false. Therefore, he gives the example of a building, saying that if its foundations are destroyed, the building will all collapse on top of it, to demonstrate that, in doubting his most basic thoughts, he can also doubt the beliefs which rest on them (see Cottingham, 1986, p. 12).

After having claimed that the senses can deceive us at any time, Descartes moves on to more certain truths. He says that things such as physics, astronomy and medicine can be doubted as they are based on physical objects. Things such as arithmetic and geometry however, seem indubitable as, whether we are awake or asleep, a square has four sid

Some topics in this essay:
, Meditation God, Descartes Meditations, Descartes Meditation, God Meditation, Surely God, method doubt, malicious demon, cottingham 1986, cottingham 1986 14, idea malicious demon, doubt beliefs, knowledge indubitable, mind body, idea malicious, 1986 14, deceived leads, world forms,