Analysis Of Meditation Three By Rene Descartes

Great Essays
In “Meditation Three” Rene’ starts out with an attempt to contemplate the existence of God by closing his eyes and meditate. He his struck by the very thoughts that every individual does at the initiation of this process. He starts out by purging his thoughts but upon realizing the impossibility of his action he starts objectifying them. The injection of god happens when he contemplates that deception might occur of evidentiary matters. Yet he profoundly asserts himself in a moment of spontaneity about his perception of certain things and his own existence. In this journey of thoughts, he sets out to find evidence of God’s existence rather than just believing that God exists merely because he can think. He believes the production of ideas …show more content…
He is on a journey to shed a light of the physical world and material things around him that he senses. He is considering about conceptual ideas to be true and are immutable laws of nature rather than his own fabrication. He can demonstrate all of the properties of the conceptual ideas he knows and, therefore, considers them as true and is most certain of all. He equates that since the concepts of sciences is an idea that exists within him and to is true then God must exist because the concept of God exists within him. He further clarifies that God does exist rather than just the concept of God. He is consumed with thoughts that every facet of geometry and mathematics can be explained through their various properties, so can God’s existence be proved through the nature of life and the very thought that God exist. He further concludes that whether dreaming or fully conscious that God does exist and everything is dependent upon …show more content…
He states that he has more grasp of the human mind than the perception of corporeal things. He has no doubt that God exist and is complete and independent unlike him who is incomplete and dependent on God. He believes that his perception of God has been instilled in him by the very entity and has ruled out deception, for deception can only be the work of the devil. He asserts infallibility of the perception of God because the very idea is instilled in him by God. He finds himself in the maze of circular reasoning about not erring about God because God is an entity that cannot err so the premise fulfills the conclusion. He is satisfied not knowing the reasons for his imperfection and relinquishes his critical intellect to mere some reasoning the supreme creator has. His reasoning for human errors is a simultaneous concurrence of intellect and will. He agrees that all the intellect should not be given to one person rather than be distributed amongst many. He also agrees that his intellect, faculty of understanding, memory or imagination are highly feeble and limited that of God.
Descartes asserts that he is incapable of mistakes if he thinks about God due to the fact that everything in him is bestowed upon him from God. But he is capable of mistake because he is not the supreme being or if he contemplates Oblivion. He knows that the sense of reasoning he got from God is finite and subject to mistakes. He

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    He believes that, “there is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us”…

    • 515 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    For example n Descartes writing of the third meditation Descartes writes that since God isn’t a deceiver because Descartes writes we clearly and distinctly view god as a non-deceiver. Then he says God’s existence provides us with clear and distinct…

    • 1477 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this paper, I will provide an analysis for one of the celebrated arguments by Descartes written in the Meditations. The challenging argument presented by Descartes is the argument from ignorance, which is precisely claimed in his First Meditation. Moreover, the skeptical argument requires for one to know that the present external world is not a dream in order to have knowledge that an external world exists. Otherwise, one does not really know that an external world exists. As noted, this argument of logical possibility presents difficulties when attempting to provide a satisfactory answer to avoid the questioning of the entailment of what one knows.…

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    What steps does Descartes take to prove his existence and that God exists? (one of the proofs). Discuss whether his reasoning is sound and convincing. In this essay, I will discuss how after the first and second meditation, Descartes knows that he exists and that he is a thinking thing.…

    • 1006 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He says if God didn’t exist we would all be perfect. We wouldn’t have any doubts or desires. You can’t doubt the existence of God since the idea of god has infinite objective reality and is more likely to be true. The idea of God could have come from your parents, and they got it from your grandparents. It’s a never ending cycle that could only conclude the idea of God originating from God.…

    • 1191 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dolegui Wilfried Nanfack PHIL 2101-(ET6) For this paper, I’ll be talking about Descartes’s argument for dualism in the “sixth Meditation” and “multiple personalities”. Descartes, both as a philosopher and scientist, is at two levels of understanding of the real. It’s back to nature in a mechanistic framework to which the body is subjected, and at the same time, it supports a dualism of soul and body in which the soul escapes the body determinations. In his sixth Meditation the author methodically describes the characters that are unique to the soul and the body and raises the contradictions that result from their union. In addition, it plays a fundamental role in the game of passion that bases all of his moral theory.…

    • 739 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes, the author claims that he doubted on his own identity, and tried to rethink and re-imagine what he really is. According to this book, “I [Descartes] am not that structure of limbs which is called a human body. I am not even some thin vapour which permeates the limbs- a wind, fire, air, breath, or whatever I depict in my imagination; for these things which I have supposed to be nothing.” As he claimed before, “I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me,” which indicates that all the things that the author can feel and imagine could be all…

    • 199 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    By claiming that thinking and reason are the perfections God has given humanity, he is trying to get everyone to use these perfections more. Descartes is trying to inspire people to think more through the entirety of his Discourse on Method. He uses his own story as a model for what can be gained by reasoning and deep thought. God is set up as an ideal to further push his readers to think and reason more. The predominately Christian audience he is writing to will more than likely start to view thinking and reasoning as good when they are presented as perfections given directly to humanity by God.…

    • 1027 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In Meditations of First Philosophy, Descartes explains philosophical meditations written over six days. The Second Meditation concerns the nature of the human mind. Descartes argues that the human mind is better known than the body. A major claim of his is his most famous quote “I think, therefore I am,” meaning a thinking thing, such as himself, can exist. In this essay, I will prove that Descartes’ argument in the Second Meditation for his existence as a thinking thing is convincing.…

    • 1180 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    At the beginning of his fourth meditation, Descartes begins reflecting on the three main certainties that he has developed so far: 1) that God exists, 2) that God is not a deceiver, and 3) that God created him and is therefore responsible for all his faculties, including his faculty of judgment. Descartes seems satisfied with the first two convictions, however, he begins to explore the conflict that arises with the third; that, “if everything that is in me comes from God, and he did not endow me with a faculty for making mistakes, it appears that I can never go wrong” (Descartes and Cottingham 38). This dilemma, also known as the “Problem of Error”, prompts the need for Descartes to reconcile the two, seemingly contradictory positions. While…

    • 1286 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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.…

    • 1901 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I will argue that Descartes, using his own criteria for making and avoiding mistakes, cannot be making a mistake when he proves the existence of God in meditation three in his Meditations on First Philosophy. I will develop my argument in two parts. First, I will present Descartes’s argument for how mistakes are made and avoided.…

    • 789 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The philosopher René Descartes expresses his belief that he has proven the existence of God beginning in Meditation III. By this time in his meditations, Descartes has concluded that the only thing he can be sure of is that he exists and is a thinking thing. Through this thinking, he concludes that he knows nothing for certain. Descartes begins considering the existence of God by examining the contents of his mind. It is through his innate idea of God that Descartes concludes that God exists, and through God’s existence his understanding of the material world as a whole is concluded.…

    • 986 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the Third Meditations Descartes formulates the idea of God in order for him to gain a better knowledge of the world around him, and for us to ponder the thought of the all powerful god. Descartes believes that God has left our lives up to us but has created a path for us to follow, that will allow us to “achieve understanding of the fundamental principals of the entire physical universe.” (Cottingham, 48). This idea is known as the ‘Trademark Argument’, because it revolves around the idea that God has placed the idea of himself within…

    • 1214 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    René Descartes first builds up his position in Meditations on First Philosophy by starting with pushing aside all that we know and learned as it was based on the empiricist thinking, that our beliefs are to be based on our sense experience, which is the perceived foundation of how everyone thinks. This way of thinking, according to Descartes, should be abandon as it is a defective way to do so when learning. Even thinking by numbers and figures are not a good foundation when gaining knowledge in Descartes’ Meditations, so he takes through his thoughts so that we come to same conclusion as him on why the methodological doubt should be used to better our understanding of the world. The beliefs we currently have are invalid since our senses…

    • 703 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays