Descartes' Discours de la Méthode: Quatrième Partie

?
  • Created by: CaraPW
  • Created on: 18-04-21 16:18
View mindmap
  • Descartes DDLM part 4
    • Doubt
      • Practises hyperbolic doubt
      • Doubts senses, demonstrations, and the ability to establish between reality and dreams
      • Not possible to doubt everything
      • Doesn't want to be confused with sceptics who doubt for doubting's sake but instead wants to arrive at own conclusion
      • The very action of doubting makes things certain
    • The Cogito
      •  He is a doubting thing. Doubting is thinking, and something that thinks exists – Cogito ergo sum/penser c’est être (I think therefore I am)
      •  Man is a thinking substance; this also implies that the soul (the thinking substance) is distinct from the body
      • He's very sure of this assertion, as it passes his method
    • Proving the existence of a god
      • asks permission to use scholasticism’s terminology, even though he has previously criticised it
      • 1) Since man has perfections, he necessarily derives them from a being more perfect than himself, this we call God
      •      2)  the existence of a perfect being is included in the  idea of this being, just as the value of the sum of the angles of a triangle is included in the very idea of a triangle 
      • The existence of God is a metaphysical certainty, it is impossible to conceive things otherwise – it is even more certain than the existence of the material world, which is a moral certainty
      • God makes truth possible
    • Clear and distinct Perception
      •  Clarity comes from divine perfection, and obscurity from nothingness
      • When ideas are clear and distinct, they are true and perfect and necessarily have a divine origin which confirms their truth
      •  False thoughts are the mark of man’s imperfection
      • Knowledge of God and the soul thus validates the criteria of clear and distinct perception
      • It does not matter if one dreams, if the ideas one perceives are clear and distinct. Waking up is more conducive to the discovery of truth, but a geometer can invent a theorem in his sleep

Comments

No comments have yet been made

Similar French resources:

See all French resources »See all French Philosophical Greats resources »