Descartes, Father of Modern Ph

Deep-seated and often implicit beliefs about what should go through for knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, the good life, are generally acknowledged to be fundamental to the way we think and act in life. An important intellectual challenge in this regard is finding one's way among the increasing variety of theoretical perspectives, ideologies and truth claims that abound in scholarly fields. In this view, science is regarded as part of, created by and, hence, embedded in human culture. A still unresolved question and debate arising from this state of affairs is: should we continue in our knowledge endeavors to follow the old, analytic tradition of Western sc

ience, or does it serve mankind (and especially intellectuals as creators of new ideas and understandings) better to become "contextualizers", "story-tellers", "faith healers" or "conversationists"? Perhaps more pointedly, should one have to choose at all?

Many of the philosophers we have been reading about in class seem to me to be hopelessly dated. Although some of them express useful ideas and or make good points. Of course, it is easy to become trapped in writing only for the period in which a person is living, and a philosophy is necessarily dependant on the historical situation and the extent of man’s knowledge. And many of the philosophers who have existed over the course of centuries have necessarily had to worry about governmental, church or societal disapproval, censorship, or punishment. A court for the crime of explaining his ideas, for instance, sentenced Socrates, to death.

In many ways, he constructs a convincing argument for the existence of the self, and for the process of the thinking being, the essence of that self. In this meditation on his philosophy, Descartes on numerous attempts tries to convince both the readers, as well as himself, of his theory that we must reject all of our present ideas and beliefs and start from nothing. He believes that the only thing that has any certainty at this point is “his own existence as a thinking being”. Everything else, which he has learned throughout his entire life and believed in, is to be thrown out because it is not known “clearly and distinctly”. Descartes’ method and theory on knowledge was well planned and carefully thought out

Though his techniques of doubting everything, which he believed to exist, and establishing a new philosophy, Descartes discovered that without a doubt, the only thing he could truly believe to exist was his own mind. He then supposed that a demon was deceiving him by causing him to believe that which he say. With this idea, he concluded, “all external things are merely the delusion of dreams” which the demon was devising. By being able to convince himself of ideas and by being able to be deceived by the demon. He also came to the conclusion that if he were to cease from thinking, he would cease to exist entirely.

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