René Descartes

René Descartes was a French philosopher, well known for his Mediations on First Philosophy. In the Mediations on First Philosophy, his main goal in the mediation is find certainty. He tries to determine the meaning of knowledge and what we really know. His method of solving this is simply focusing on a specific target and if he is capable of finding a possible way to doubt it, it is automatically rejected. The first mediation focuses on his methodology in trying to define knowledge through the…

easily demonstrate multiple philosophical theories and make them simple for the viewer to understand. One of the first philosophical theories to be given is also one of the main subplots of the movie, Rene Descartes’ ‘Methodological Doubt’ which essentially questions if this world is real. When Descartes said “I think; therefore I am”, he meant that without a doubt he himself was at least real but everything else could be doubted. The first major example of this…

Lucretia Field 001691599 Philosophy 1101 Paper 2 The Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes examines the way in which material objects are observed through cognitive understanding through the senses and what is known about the world. In the second meditation, Descartes examines the nature of the mind and how it relates to the physical observed properties. The specific example which is used in this meditation is the example of a ball of wax which, when melted changes in all…

Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method was written with the premise in mind that there is a sequential approach to guiding one’s reason in order to maximize certainty of knowledge and discovery. Using an autobiographical method, Descartes deliberately does not push his method upon the reader, nor frame it as the best and only method that exists. Using an explanatory model, and detailing his exact thought process throughout the Discourse, he allows the reader to follow him on his journey and decide…

things and what do we know about them? Rene Descartes is known for being the ‘father of modern philosophy’. Born at the end of the 15th century, Descartes comes from a time of religion, myth and superstition where the world of knowledge comes from what they were told by their landowners and their churches and this remained up until the 17th century. The world was then enlightened with knowledge when scientists such as Galileo, Mutant and Descartes came along. Descartes wished to establish a…

In René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, the author aims to create an unshakable foundation of metaphysics for the sciences. In doing so, the work’s meditator comes to conclude that he is a thinking substance distinct from material substance, and thus all mental substances are independent of corporeal bodies. Central to how this view explains conscious experience of sensing and perceiving external bodies is the interaction between the mental substance of the mind and corporeal…

Rene Descartes methods of meditation focuses on distinguishing the significant difference of the human mind, and how we can understand it through recognizing how neither animals nor machines don’t possess the human mind/rational. In effect Descartes distinguishes the human rational apart from non-humans, even though the two closely resemble each other through their senses organs. However, it is because the mechanical lacks a sufficient concept that makes it necessary to be on par with humans.…

Introduction (200) René Descartes was a French scientist, mathematician and philosopher in the 17th century. His work had a great impact on the world of philosophy. One of his well known work is the First Meditation. In this paper he raises doubt against his era’s best minds’ teachings and belief system so against the foundations of what that world was built on. As he says, “I realized that it was necessary, once in my life, to demolish everything completely and start again from the fundations”.…

Descartes' philosophy regarding dualism is one of his most notorious philosophical legacies to this day. He claims the body and mind are entities that operate individually which allows one to exist without the other. It is to say that the mind is a non-extended, thinking entity and the body is extended and non-thinking. His notion evoked a deliberation over the essence of mind and body that stretched throughout hundreds of years. To this day a heated debate occurs about this idea of mind and…

According to Descartes’ Meditations, the mind practically has the definite ability to think only. Anything more than this fact can be left to multiple interpretations that can be doubted. Because of this, Descartes introduces a list of capacities that a thinking thing can execute. As thinking is considered the only definite action, the capacities are the subset of thinking as an action. They create pairs of opposing forms of thinking that cover the whole spectrum of the human mind. These…