Now that Descartes has established his own existence as a thinking thing as well as the existence of God as infinite substance, he must now try to bring back the physical world whose very existence he called into question in Meditation I. Is he able to topple his own dream argument here? Can he ever come to trust his senses again? And what of his own body? Does it really belong to him and, if so, what is its relation to his mind? Also, if you ever wondered what a chiliagon (a thousand-sided polygon) looks like, here's a drawing of what Descartes could understand but not imagine.
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After reading all of Descartes “Meditations”, I am taking on Descartes own role of being filled with doubt. The two main points that Descartes attempts to prove is that there is a God, and that the human mind is separate from the human body. I am having a problem agreeing and accepting Descartes explanations for these ideas solely because he is assuming the truths about the world that he has called into question in the first three Meditations. At this point in time, I am only confident in accepting Descartes idea of all of being “thinking things.” Descartes reasoning for proving an existence of God is to diminish the possibility of an evil genius. I agree with Descartes that God would never allow an evil genius to corrupt our minds, but his rationale of proving this point undermines his thoughts and beliefs that our put forth in the first 3 meditations. Descartes makes unnecessary assumptions that cause him to undermine his own ideas! My final critique and doubt of Descartes is that I do not fully understand his stance on senses. He goes through the first three meditations doubting them and then turns around and uses senses as a main tool of proving the separation of body and soul. If these are truly simple assumptions that he is making, then we may need to throw out some of the conclusions drawn from his Meditations.
- JOSEPH FINKE
Descartes opens his fourth Meditation by exploring the topic of truth and error. He concludes that the will extends further than the scope of the intellect, and in order to obtain the truth of a thing one must make judgments only on what he has a “clear and distinct” understanding of. In applying this statement to the whole of Descartes inquiry, I feel that in all of his philosophic endeavors are manipulated by his will overextending his intellect. The arguments Descartes made in proving the existence of God, for example, in my opinion were not founded in a “clear and distinct” anything, but more so in his desire for God’s existence. First calling into question the existence of a material world outside of himself and the validity of his knowledge, Descartes initially doubts everything he has imagined. It seems contradictory, therefore, in the latter Meditations for him to have decided that everything he imagines is due to entities that are external to him and whose existence he is not at all necessary for, and that the essence of these material things lie in their scientific and mathematical qualities which he had to have imagined before proving their real existence. Descartes’ Meditations were mind-boggling not only because of their intellectual complexity and his verbosity, but largely because his arguments to me seemed fragmented and flipped back and forth. Also, I am hesitant to accept anything Descartes attempted to prove in the Meditations following his pronouncement of a perfect God’s infinite existence as his later theories were all predicated on the rather shoddy argument that claimed to prove the truth of God.
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