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Out of class short paper

Paper 2

The radical methodology of doubt is the science of doubting everything that exists.
Descartes believes that we should examine the false opinions we accepted as true in our
childhood and seek the best of all arguments and make them true demonstrations. Descartes is
trying to prove the concept that human soul is separate from the body and that God exists. To
prove this concept, he uses a method of doubt. Through this method, Descartes is sure that we
will free ourselves from prejudices with the intention of being able to withdraw our mind from
our senses. According to Descartes, our senses can be deceived into believing things that do not
exist or are not real. He, therefore, doubted the reliability of our sense experience. In doing so,
Descartes sets a base for being able to decipher the truth from the falsity (39). Descartes reason
to doubt what he learned from childhood does not only come from his desire to know the truth.
He wants to establish something firm. He says that our senses can sometime be misleading.

In paragraph three of the first meditation, he says that our senses sometimes deceive us
and prudence suggests that we should not trust those who have deceived us even once. He says
that we should set it aside (13). Descartes says that even in a dream, we can have dream
experiences that we cannot tell whether they are real experiences or not. There is no sure sign
from a dream that we can say that the dream is in fact not real. He says that reality might be very
different from what he thinks reality is (15). This means that what we have learned from
experience and observations, that we consider to be real, might not be real at all.

Descartes says that suppose a powerful and cunning evil spirit wishes to deceive us then
we will be deceived (16). Descartes somehow concludes that we cannot us any form of test to
determine whether the knowledge we have gained is true knowledge, because any test we use
could be manipulated or made deceptive by an evil spirit that he is hypothesizing in the place of
God. Through all these, we can see that Descartes doubts empiricism as a foundation of
epistemology. Because he says that we may gain experience from a deceived point of view.
Someone might have deceived us to believing that some things are true when they are not true at
all.
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When explaining whether prior reasoning is a reliable foundation for epistemology or

not, Descartes talks about the ‘evil genius’. He says that our thinking process may be influenced
by an evil being that manipulates us to think what we are thinking. For instance, he says that we
can say that ‘we are, we exist’ (20) as long as we are thinking. This means that a prior reasoning
may only make sense as long as we are still reasoning. If we cease reasoning, it might also come
to pass that we might immediately cease altogether to reason.

A cogito is a philosophical principle that states that one’s existence is demonstrated by

the fact that one thinks. It goes with the phrase, “I am, I exist”. Before Descartes arrive at the
cognito, he finds a belief that is certain. That is, a belief that cannot be false. Descartes says that
knowledge requires certainty. That for one to start acquiring knowledge, he has to start from a
known point of view. Descartes realizes that the cognito withstands the evil-demon test. He says,
“the evil-demon will never convince him that he should be nothing as long as he thinks he is
something” (20). He believes that however much he can be deceived to believe anything, he can
only be deceived because he exists. That is, even if one doubts his own existence, he must first
exist to doubt his existence. It is not possible to be deceived or doubt anything if one doesn’t
exist. The Cognito is very important because it is like a certain knowledge of one’s own
existence. That is, in a world where there are deceptive voices, no one can deceive us that we do
not exist.

Through this, Descartes concludes that cognito is the basis of human epistemology. He
says that material things outside the mind exists and that the mind and the body are distinct in
reality. Descartes adds that he knows that everything that is an object of pure mathematics exist.
He considers material objects to be mathematical objects which are known by the intellect rather
than senses. Just like we know that we exist (cognito), material objects also exist. Descartes
literally says that we cannot doubt the existence of anything that is an object of mathematics. The
dimension of reality that is evident in these meditations is the ontological dimension of reality.
That is, the interpretation of an individual of what constitutes a fact in reasoning. Descartes
inserts a divide in a man’s direct knowledge. The divide between knowledge learned from the
senses and those learned from mathematical objects.
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References
Descartes, Rene. (2008). Meditations on First Philosophy: With selections from the objections
and replies. Oxford University Press, Oxford