Descartes
The Meditations are one of Descartes most important works. They consist of his views on sensory perception, God and Nature. He considers the problems of the sources and nature of knowledge; the validity of truth; the nature and destiny of man; the existence of god, and the creation of the universe. Of the six meditations, the third is the most important. In the third mediation Descartes proves the existence of God, which provides him the foundation for the remaining three meditations. In Descartes second meditation, he established that because he is a thinking being, he exists. In the third meditation, Descartes attempts to build upon this foundation by questioning whether or not anything exists outside of him. In order to do so, he must distinguish between those of his thoughts that come from outside, and those, which only seem to. Descartes begins by analyzing the nature of thought and dissects what consists our ideas. An idea maybe an image, a form or a judgment and Descartes claims that the image or the form can never be false. The only idea that can deceive is thought. He states, " Thus the only remaining thoughts where I must be on my guard against making a mistake are my judgments. And the chief and most commo
He analyzes specific causes of his existence, such as himself, his parents, something less than God (or that he has several partial causes) or that he always existed. The cause and effect theory allows Descartes to argue that his parents could have created him. But here the issue of infinite regress Descartes discusses comes into play. When questioning if he could have been caused by several partial causes, again Descartes uses the cause and effect theory. Secondly, Descartes realizes that although he does not possess the potential to be perfect or to possess God-like qualities, that he does not now nor could he ever possess any actual perfection. He does so by arguing that although ideas - by their definition - can only contain objective reality, that they must come from something that contains formal reality. " He goes through each category and argues that aside from the idea of God, all his other ideas could originate from himself. " There are two major points Descartes makes in this statement. In meditations four, five and six Descartes uses his proof of the existence of God in meditation three as a foundation to further his other arguments. And it follows that such a cause must bring together all the characteristics and perfection's that belong to God, and thus would be God. In order for an given idea to contain such and such objective reality, it must surely derive it from some cause which contains at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality in the idea (p91). " Descartes defines God as being perfect- where one of the conditions is that God cannot deceive, since deception would take away from his perfection- in meditation three, and this allows him to make the above statement in meditation four. Descartes is now left with a single idea, which along with his theory of the existence of God must reveal an existence apart from his own. Firstly, since he is a finite substance, he cannot account for the fact that he has an idea of something infinite. He concludes that since he has an idea of God, that such a God must truly exist.
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