Read for Week 9: (Chapter 22) Meditations I & II Rene Descartes, 235- 244.
Rene Descartes is one of the most important philosophers of all time. People who know nothing else about philosophy, know his “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore, I am). Descartes Meditations is an attempt to find a foundation that can support our beliefs about the world. In order to discover this foundation, Descartes proposes to doubt everything until he finds something that cannot be doubted, which will serve as his foundation. Descartes is not a skeptic. He uses skepticism as a way of proving that there is a foundation for our beliefs. Descartes, a mathematician and the person who discovered Cartesian coordinates, proposes to build a system of knowledge that is similar to geometry, founded on axioms from which theorems can be derived. To get to the axioms he doubts everything that is possible to doubt until he finds something that is indubitable, which provides his axiom. The foundation (axiom) he discovers leads Descartes to develop an “Ego” theory of the self that will be criticized in the following weeks. The textbook only includes the first two meditations. There are four meditations more that are not included in our textbook that build upon the first two meditations to show that we indeed have knowledge of the world.
Discussion question one:
Do you agree with Descartes that you are essentially a mind, that it is your mind that makes you who you are, that our bodies are irrelevant to who we are? Give the reasons for your beliefs. (250 words)
Discussion question two:
Descartes concludes near the end of his 2nd Meditation that “I am something real and really existent, but what thing am I? I have already given the answer: a thing which thinks.” (p.243) Explain Descartes’ argument for the claim that we are essentially beings that think, that we are minds and that our bodies are irrelevant to what we are.
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