Descartes Meditations

Descartes in this meditation wants to clarify what "I" is and how he can achieve this

conclusion. He does not want to use his senses or imagination because as he has stated before

they can be deceiving. He asserts how his senses and imagination are deceiving because he does

not know if what he sees, smells or perceives to be truth, exists only in his head. He uses a piece

of wax to explain what he thinks the wax is according to his senses. His sense of taste tells him

that it still has some of the honey flavor, his sense of smell says that it still smells like flowers

and his sense of touch says that it is hard and cold. As he burns the wax it loses its honey flavor,

scent of flowers and its hardness but he still knows that …show more content…
He uses this example to show that his mind is greater than his

body. His body is like the sensible features of the wax which can only be determined by the

senses. On the other hand his mind is like the core properties of what makes wax despite the

many forms wax can achieve when under heat or cold which translates to his mind will still exist

whether his body exists or not or what shape it comes in.

Descartes in his argument does not realize there is a contradiction. He says that he does

not want to use his senses because they are deceiving. Descartes says, “For example, I now see a

light, I hear a noise… Properly speaking, this is what is called ‘sensing.’ But this precisely so

taken, is nothing other than thinking”(66). He believes that his senses are now just a thought of

what his body is sensing. This example makes me think that the mind cannot exist without the

senses, which in turn becomes the body. I believe this to be true because he also explains that his

imagination can just make things up and it is part of his mind. Following the use of the

imagination, we need our senses in order to imagine things. In class we used the example of …show more content…
Descartes wants to explain that something makes the wax aside from

the sensible features, almost like the forms of Plato. Descartes’s form of the wax is, “ that is

something extended, flexible and mutable” (67). These three features exist in everyone’s mind

and that is why we know the wax was still wax despite losing its sensible features. The same

should be said about what makes Descartes himself and in a more general sense what makes

humans, humans.

In a modern sense, the invention of touchscreen devices could be seen as a contradiction

of using our senses to use our mind. I do not believe anyone had seen or felt a touch-sensitive

device before the creation of the first one. It had to be that someone thought about it and that it

would be useful. Although similarly to the unicorn example where pieces of previous inventions

were probably used to create the touch-sensitive glass on these devices, some external

knowledge of the mind had to be used in order to enable the parts of the old inventions to

combine to create a touch-sensitive glass. Following Descartes thoughts the only explanation

would be that the idea of a touch-sensitive device exists in our mind without the need of our