Philosophy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 20

Philosophy - Essay Example Propositions are most securely knowable and most vulnerable to doubt are based on the idea that doubting, understanding, asserting, denying, willing, refusing, imagining, and seeming to perceive. That proof for body does not involve the inspection of entities in an inner arena, although it is a reflective exercise laying out various possibilities and probabilities, arriving slowly at the conclusion that bodies exist even though they may not be as they seem. Descartes argues that any of the three main truths in the Meditations â€Å"I exist, God exists, bodies exist† is reached by the inspection of entities; certainly they are not modeled on retinal images. These truths are the result of careful analysis of ideas and, in the case of the cogito, of the activity of trying to doubt that a person exists. There really is no account in the Meditations of perception of bodies, no analysis of knowledge of physical objects, of scientific knowledge. When Descartes wanted to discover the nature of some object, event, or activity, such as light, vision, or the mechanism of the body, he resorted to observation and experiment--at least, to what he took to be observation, as with the examination of the eyes of buffs. By his doubt, Descartes does not mean to reject permanently all of his former beliefs. Some of them may well be true. Descartes wants to rediscover them, in the sense of showing that they follow logically from basic, indubitable propositions. The main purpose of the doubt is to find these indubitable propositions, so that Descartes can use them as "foundations" upon which to rebuild his knowledge. The doubt is a way of rethinking everything from the beginning, so as to achieve the certainty that Descartes is seeking. One standard interpretation of Descartess notion of clarity and distinctness sees it as being inspired by mathematics. The truth of the substance theory is based on the correctness of a particular