In order to acquire absolutely certainty, Descartes must first lay a complete foundation of integrity on which to build up his knowledge. The technique he uses to lay this base is doubt. If any belief can be doubted it is not certain, therefore making unusable as a foundation. Descartes starts by looking at our usual sources for truth. Authority, which is churches, parents, and schools, he says, are not reliable sources for truth because time shows we all die, and that we are eventually proved wrong, much in the same way the accepted truths of science have changed dramatically over the course of history. Also, he considers the generally excepted view that our senses dependably report the absolute nature of reality. Like authority though, Descartes discards the senses as a source of truth because of the ‘Dream Argument’ or the belief that based on the senses there is no definite way of

In the Sixth Meditation, the last section in our text, Descartes hopes to prove the existence of the external world and matter (physical objects located in space). To do this first he again acknowledges the existence of minds as an immaterial substance and God. Next, he shows that external ideas, or images of things are neither fashioned by himself or by God because he has ideas of things that don't depend on his will. From this he can say that he will know matter exists if its image was not a product of the mind or god. To prove this attributes the existence of external ideas to the imagination, which is the psychological power of receiving and processing images. Then he says that thinking is his only essential property which excludes imagination because thinking or consciousness doesn't require images. He states that the only reason we have an imagination is because we have temporary physical bodies. He then concludes that he is not the cause of his external ideas. To show that God is not the cause of external ideas or images he first states that it is self-evident that external things refer to objects in space. Subsequently, if God is causing these ideas, then they are not in space. But that would mean that God is deceiving him about a self-evident idea, which can't be possible because holding to the truth that God is perfect, God is incapable of deception. Consequently, God is not the cause of these external ideas because God ensures the truth of self-evident ideas. To summarize, neither God nor Descartes is the cause of external ideas, therefore proving that matter exists.

This leads us to wonder about the relationship between the immaterial mind and material body, commonly known in philosophy as the mind/body problem. Descartes takes the stance of a strong dualist or someone who believes that the mind and the body are not only separate, but competent of independent existence. Other positions are that of the weak dualist, who feels that while the mind and body are metaphysically distinct, they cannot exist independently of one another, and that of the materialist who deem that only physical things and physical procedures exist, while the mind does not. Beliefs of this nature are brought up in relation to Descartes’ question of what makes a thing particularly itself through time and change. For him, it is the mind/soul that exists through time and change.

proving that you are dreaming or that you are awake. Therefore it is possible that everything we believe is false, making the senses an unreliable source. Upon establishing this, Descartes doubts the existence of a physical or external world. Despite that he has an idea of things in the world, he has no definitive way of knowing if they exist beyond his own mind. Another foundation that he tries to confirm is mathematics. But he soon realizes math’s truth isn’t completely reliable because of the ‘Demon Hypothesis’, which acknowledges the possibi

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