Descartes' Discours de la Méthode: Quatrième Partie
- Created by: CaraPW
- Created on: 18-04-21 16:18
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- 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
- Doubt
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