Rene Descartes Meditation Summary

Perhaps one of the most influential books in western philosophy, Meditations on First Philosophy, written by René Descartes, was first published in 1641. Descartes was a French rationalist, born in the 17th century. He is famously known by his contributions to the field of epistemology, mainly through his book. In Meditations, Descartes decides to put into question all of his previous knowledge, in order to determine what is false and dubious, and what is undoubtedly true. The book is divided into six meditations, in which each meditation addresses a specific issue. After finishing writing the manuscript for Meditations, Descartes sent it to different philosophers, theologians and logicians before publishing it. All those who received Descartes manuscript wrote him back, with a set of seven pointed objections to some of Descartes’ arguments. Descartes replied to each those objections, and added both the objections and replies to his final manuscript, before publishing it.
In the First Meditation, Descartes writes about how and why we should put all of our beliefs into questioning. He writes about how he has been struck with all the falsehoods he once believed to be true, and how he wants to separate true knowledge from falsities. To do …show more content…
One of the objections presented in this set is directed towards Descartes’ argument of the unreliability of the senses. The author of the objection writes he is concerned with Descartes claim that the senses are unreliable, and that consequently the intellect is much more reliable than the senses. The critic claims that any preceding knowledge the intellect has acquired, has somehow derived previously from (other) senses. His argument lays in the idea of how can the intellect realize that the information acquired through certain sense is wrong, without using another sense to correct such