Essays on Rene Descartes

In the Second Meditation of The Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes addresses the question of identity: “I am, I exist… But this ‘I’ that must exist––I still don’t properly understand what it is.” (Descartes 4) The only circumstance helping establish identity is that Descartes thinks––in...

In Ren? Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, he argues that the senses do not accurately help us understand the world. Descartes writes that he has begun to doubt all of his ideas. He decides that all those ideas come from the senses, which are not...

Over the course of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes suspends belief in all material and metaphysical substance before rebuilding from the foundational element of the thinker’s existence, eventually concluding that God exists alongside material things and that the soul and body are distinct. However,...

Descartes’ Proof for the Existence of God and its Importance In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes describes his philosophical quest to find absolute, certain knowledge. His method for finding this knowledge is to start from the most basic truths, systematically working through them and trying...

Goethe, a German writer and statesman once said, “We know with confidence only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases”. But what is knowledge? A term that philosophers have been in search of for centuries, according to the modern definition, knowledge is facts, information,...

In the meditations, Descartes aims to provide a sound basis for science, and to vindicate rationalism by proving that true source of scientific knowledge lies in the mind and not the senses. In order to prove that the mind should be the true source of...

The scientific revolution was a time of radical change throughout Europe. This rapid development of man leads to our modern concept of science. Changes in religion and thought also developed the scientific revolution. Many prominent figures were leaders in this time of growth including Robert...

Dualism is the theory introduced by philosopher René Descartes in which “the mind and body are both separate from each other; performing separate functions, and yet are intertwined. For example, some body functions are the cause of the mind and vice versa, and yet the...

Since the publication of The Discourse on the Method, Renes Descartes appears to have become the poster boy for the position of mind/body dualism. Throughout the Discourse and his later works, Descartes postulates several arguments for the absolute distinction and, thus, separateness of the mind...

In this essay, I am going to analyse the relation between “I” and God two concepts from Descartes’s book A Discourse on the Method. People of his time in France would never have dared to say that “I” come before god, because they thought that...

David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and historian, thrived during the Enlightenment era. In this segment of history, which is also known as the Age of Reason, European scholars attempted to find the root of knowledge, often by working through one of two prevalent schools of...

Descartes, an intelligent man of many talents, believed that knowledge came from the mind and that through self-reflection could more knowledge be gained and built upon. Through Descartes’s own journey to gain more knowledge, Descartes wrote his Six Meditations. Within these Six meditations, He forms...

The scientific revolution had a very large impact on the advancement of the way people thought about things and the way they examined and viewed the world. Without the scientific revolution we may not have been able to experiment and observe the world the way...

How can we know if we are a brain in a vat? Can we be sure that we are not the playthings of evil demons? These questions have been discussed by many philosophers in the past and still we do not have a proof that...

Descartes example is simply about the mass difference a lump of wax can have; we may perceive it as one thing when in fact it can be seen as much more. Descartes uses an ordinary lump of wax as an argument about taking things into...

A Response to: Sum Res Volans: The Centrality of Willing for Descartes In Sum Res Volans: The Centrality of Willing for Descartes, Andreea Mihali challenges the standard interpretation of Descartes’ work. Many commentators interpret Descartes’ arguments in the Meditations to “mean that the essence of...

According to Critical Thinking and Ethics, very few people qualify as critical thinkers. Critical thinkers can rationally think about what to do or what to believe. Having an open mind is crucial in achieving this because it gives a person the ability to look at...

Body and Soul Rene Descartes presents in his Meditations on First Philosophy the idea of dualism, the belief that the body and the soul exist separately from each other. Physical human bodies are composed of cells, tissue, blood, organs, skin, a brain and the like....

John Locke and Rene Descartes are quite often seen as two of the first early philosophers. Both of them looking for answers to the same questions such as: is there certainty in knowledge? What is knowledge? How does our mind work? While Locke and Descartes...