Descartes Meditation Analysis

At the core of Descartes’ Meditations is the question about truth in our world, specifically what can we definitively know/perceive to be true and how do we arrive at this conclusion. When he reaches the end of his second meditation Descartes establishes that while there is uncertainty in the way we perceive things because of our senses, the intellect can still understand the most fundamental aspects of that thing to affirm its existence. Most importantly, he concludes that his own mind is the object that can be perceived most clearly, which lays the foundation for his later arguments about the nature of God’s existence.
Leading into this conclusion Descartes has trouble finding any validation in anything being true. He claims that mostly everything …show more content…
While our vision would tell us that the final form ought to be a different object than the initial form based on the changed physical properties, we still define it as wax. How can we be so certain that the two are the same, unable to convince ourselves that one is different from the other? It is at this point that Descartes starts to formulate the idea that an entity has properties that are perceived by the intellect uninfluenced by the senses. Rather, the senses are there to provide a more vivid interpretation of that object, so even if they are imperfect in interpreting the properties of that object we can still know what that object is. From this point Descartes is able to claim that our own minds are most clearly and distinctly known because it is what judges and interprets the objects we see, so by judging that what we see exists, we are affirming that we exist; for whether our interpretations are true or contain error, our minds are working to arrive at these conclusions. If this applies for the wax, then it will apply for anything else we perceive (Meditation II, p.