Descartes Third Meditation Analysis

Descartes’ “Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy” is ultimately his journey for true knowledge. In his third meditation he tackles the topic of whether or not there is a God. So far he has talked on his methods of how to find true knowledge such as taking everything that he thinks he knows and discarding it as well as only basing what is true on the fact that he can prove it within his own mind. He has concluded this for multiple reasons such as his senses may all be just a dream and the fact that he may have been deceived by an outside force. Once he has cleared his mind of all things that may be false he began to build off of the things that he can be sure of. The only other thing that he has decided is true prior to the third meditation is the fact that he exists, if not as a body at least as a thinking being. So using what he has built up so far he begins to use his ability of reasoning in order to determine the existence of God. Using the argument that if he has an idea of something it must be true he reasons within his own mind that God must exist. …show more content…
This includes such things as the images he has in his head and the fact that he has ideas about things other than himself. In the beginning he tries to say away from saying that because he has an idea about a thing it must be true because that would not necessarily be true. That is until he adds in the argument that his ideas about the images or causes of these things may not necessarily be true but that the ideas themselves may actually in fact have existence. Using the idea that his ideas of things and the actual things are not the same things he begins to determine that all of the things he knows may quite possibly be real even not if in the way he originally