In Meditations on First Philosophy Rene Descartes attempts to reconcile a Christian metaphysics with a new epistemology contrary to the scholastic, Aristotelian worldview. He seeks new foundations that knowledge can be built upon and tries to accomplish this by identifying basic, indubitable axioms to derive more complex truths by. As Descartes had a background in mathematics and geometry, these tenets are proposed alike mathematical truths in that they are self-evidential. He calls these axioms ,”clear and distinct perceptions”. For the Cartesian epistemology and metaphysics to be plausible, these perceptions must be not only epistemologically privileged, but also universal and justifiable as mathematical truths are, in terms of semantics and self-evidentiality.
