Analysis Of Descartes Meditations Of First Philosophy

If the world you lived in wasn’t real, how would you know? In this paper, I will be discussing Descartes’s line of reasoning while attempt to prove the uncertainty of many ordinary beliefs using his universal or Cartesian doubt, in Descartes’s book Meditations on First Philosophy. Dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy”, Descartes was a philosopher in Sweden who taught others philosophy, and was also a huge advocate for mathematics, specifically geometry. He doubts everything that his senses inform his of, and even the reasoning procedure, because he wants to conquer skepticism. He knows, however, that he is real because he has the ability to think. By looking at Meditations of First Philosophy by Descartes, one can see that knowledge can’t …show more content…
Some of them seem so real, that we can hardly tell them apart from real life, which is the premise of Descartes’s argument. Everything seems so real when we are dreaming, so we often mistake it for reality. He speaks upon this, to which he says “Now let us assume that we are asleep and that all these particulars, e.g. that we open our eyes, shake our head, extend our hands, and so on, are but false delusions; and let us reflect that possibly neither our hands nor our whole body are such as they appear to us to be” (Meditations 14). He brings the senses back into this argument to support the fact that they are available when we are dreaming, just as much when we are awake. When we are dreaming, it is very difficult to distinguish is from reality, making us believe that everything occurring is real. I could be dreaming in this very moment, but be unaware of it due to the fact that my senses are working fine. As logical beings, we can begin to doubt the reality we are residing in, due to the evidence at hand, because what we know is conflicting with what is imaginary. It can be argued that we simply experience in our real-life experiences, become the basis for what we dream and fantasize about, and that the nature of both mathematics and material objects have not changed during whatever dream-like situation we believe that we may be …show more content…
We must doubt what we know, to achieve a better understanding of everything around us. Descartes believed in our ability as humans to think, and to question what we know to attain knowledge. He brought up the objections to his doubts, and explained them thoroughly. His theories came full circle, and supported his premises. Depicting the difference between reality and imagination seems like an unchallenging task, yet it’s complexity changes when doubt is brought into the equation. Overall, he was successful at proving his line of reasoning through continuous doubt, through the various examples he gave to us through his