Contrary to contemporary thought a skeptic need not necessarily be a negative person. In fact Rene Descartes believes a negative thinking person is the polar opposite of a skeptic, opinions expressed in the negative would lead Descartes to dismiss such person from being a legitimate skeptic. Descartes believed that to be a skeptic one needs to doubt all that he or she knows or understands. Upon this doubt he believes one can build a path to knowledge. This foundation of knowledge requires doubt because without it you cannot eliminate error. Descartes believed that every day we cultivate opinions that were strewn with errors, and all these errors built upon each other made our opinions "unreliable".
Descartes contends that our senses lead to unreliable conclusions and opinions. For instance a straight stick partly in water appears to be bent. This he says is an illusion filled with errors, so the only way to rid ourselves of error is to doubt as a skeptic. His straight stick example points out the value of meditation and reflective thought since all that appears to our senses may be unreliable perception. .
What Descartes suggests in his works can scare the every day man because he is asking us to take nothing for granted. He is asking us to shed all our prejudices and preconceived notions, and only then can you build a base of reliable knowledge. Descartes himself described Meditations as being a philosophy much like a tree. "The roots of the tree are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches all the other sciences".
In Meditation One Descartes flooded his mind with doubt. On page 17 of Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes says " it was necessary. to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.".
Descartes couldn't spend all day disproving every opinion he ever had so he suggested a huge leap of understanding from the start.
DesCartes--- The concept of hylomorphism; the idea that the only way to understand the form of something is through understanding its matter, is a concept that Rene Decartes completely rejects. He adamently believes in the separation of the body from the soul, or rather declaring in a more conv...
What Does It All Mean? Question #1: Is it a meaningful possibility that the inside of your mind is the only thing that exists -- or that even if there is a world outside your mind, it is totally unlike what you believe it to be? Descartes" Answer: Decartes would entertain the possibility ...
Descartes is famed by is familiar notion, "I think therefore I am (Cogito, ergo sum.)." It is a conclusion he has reached in his second meditation after much deliberation on the existence of anything certain. After he discovers his ability to doubt and to understand, he is able to substantiate his n...
Rene Descartes was born in La Haye, Touraine (France) in March of fifteen ninety-six. During the course of his life, he made many significant contributions to the progress of science, because of these achievements, he is known as the father of modern philosophy. He was a distinguished physicist, phy...
The organization I have worked for this semester is Lutheran Family Services, in particular, refugee services. This organization relocates refugees, the ones I worked with are from Sudan, Africa. A 20 year civil war has been raging in Sudan leaving families displaced and relocated. The war i...
The Sight of Science It is a truth universally acknowledged that he whose mind is ahead of his time and above that of his peers may not be understood by his fellow people and be subject to critisizm and persecution. Galilei Galileo, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes were am ong the first to b...
"Method of Radical Doubt" Descartes said " I realized that once in my life I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences." Descartes described this meaning, if he wanted to know the truth about anything and have a firm foundation in his beliefs, he would have to start from the ground up and examine every detail. Doing this, would he then only be able to believe something to be true. The purpose of his examining methodology was to be able to have a solid foundation and to understand w...
1) Descartes" argument "Cogito Ergo Sum" I am, I exist is a complex one, in alot of ways, he makes a convincing argument for the existence of the self, and for the process of the thinking being, the essence of the self. He tries to convince both the readers, as well as himself, of his theory we must reject all our present ideas and beliefs and start from nothing. Descartes is a rational thinker and he rationalizes through his studies that nothing in the world is known. He believes that the only thing that has any certainty at this point is his own existence as thinking being, Descartes" met...
1. a. Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes masterpiece conveys his will to erase all the previous beliefs and principles that was instilled in him during his childhood and start on a clean slate. His aim was the rebuilding of knowledge from the basics. The only way he was to accomplish this goal was by a plan called doubt. ...
