Descartes-1st Meditation

             Do the arguments of the First Meditation raise serious doubts about what we can know?
             The purpose of Descartes' Meditations is not to raise doubt about what can be known, but to eradicate doubt and arrive at a definite answer about what one can be certain about, indeed this is the aim of all epistemological studies. The first meditation is meant to "demolish everything and start again right from the foundations"; it is the stripping away of all the widely held beliefs that are based not on reason, as Descartes believed they should be, but in tradition and childish ignorance. Descartes saw that without starting from scratch and examining each assumption in turn he would never be able to be sure of any conclusions he attempted to draw. So this first Meditation was intended to wash away all preconceptions, to raise serious doubts as to what can be known so that the following Meditations could begin building atop of secure ground. He manages to do this successfully, though it should be noted that at the end of the first meditation he finds "there is not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may not be properly raised". He seems to have gone too far in his reasoning, and will spend the next five meditations reassessing this view.
             Descartes was not the first philosopher to tackle the problem of what can be known, in fact it had been discussed by the Ancient Greeks and in Europe in the sixteenth century, nor was he the only one to be considering in the seventeenth century, a man named Gassendi gained fame for his works on this subject at the same time as Descartes. Sextus Empiricus was the first philosopher to set out the problem in the way that Descartes would seek to solve. According to Empiricus, there were seen to be three possible ways that the truth could be discovered: by appeal to the senses, by using reason or by using a combination of the two. The problem with the first option, was the evidence that the sens...

More Essays:

APA     MLA     Chicago
Descartes-1st Meditation. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 07:20, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/21273.html