MEDITATIONS
First Meditation
The main question h at Descartes tries to answer in the First Meditation of Meditations is, as is put in the book “What can be called into doubt.” He starts out by declaring that he has does not believe in a lot of that which he used to. To be exact, the phrase is “[s]ome years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accept as true in my childhood and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.” (Cittingham, Stoothoff, Murdough; 17). He basically starts to question exactly what he can be certain about and from that point he develops his statement into three ee different types, or levels, of doubts. Concerning level one, he explicitly states that “whatever I had admitted until now as most true I received either from the senses or through the senses”-meaning that it was his senses that were deceiving him into accepting that which he was not real. Yet even the senses aren’t totally deceptive-only a madman would deny his sensual perception that “the hands and this entire body are mine.” In level two he proposes the argument that it is possible that we are just dreaming and that because our reality is a dream it cannot be reality. What we perceive, our entire universe and our existence within it, are just figments of someone or something’s imagination conjured up while dreaming. To this he answers that if we are in a dream, we can believe that the things that exist in our reality exist, to some extent, in the real world as well. In the final level of doubt he discusses the idea that God or some other being (demon) could be deceiving us.
First Meditation
The main question h at Descartes tries to answer in the First Meditation of Meditations is, as is put in the book “What can be called into doubt.” He starts out by declaring that he has does not believe in a lot of that which he used to. To be exact, the phrase is “[s]ome years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accept as true in my childhood and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.” (Cittingham, Stoothoff, Murdough; 17). He basically starts to question exactly what he can be certain about and from that point he develops his statement into three ee different types, or levels, of doubts. Concerning level one, he explicitly states that “whatever I had admitted until now as most true I received either from the senses or through the senses”-meaning that it was his senses that were deceiving him into accepting that which he was not real. Yet even the senses aren’t totally deceptive-only a madman would deny his sensual perception that “the hands and this entire body are mine.” In level two he proposes the argument that it is possible that we are just dreaming and that because our reality is a dream it cannot be reality. What we perceive, our entire universe and our existence within it, are just figments of someone or something’s imagination conjured up while dreaming. To this he answers that if we are in a dream, we can believe that the things that exist in our reality exist, to some extent, in the real world as well. In the final level of doubt he discusses the idea that God or some other being (demon) could be deceiving us.
1 comment:
hi safi. its me ruby!
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