6/27/2023 0 Comments Rene descartes meditations![]() ![]() When our perception of the world fails us, it can be jarring. Indeed, have you ever woken from a dream and thought, “but my God, that seemed so real”? Have you ever hallucinated your socks off? Have you ever sworn to have witnessed something when someone else swears to have witnessed something else? The fact we dream and hallucinate means, for Descartes, our senses aren’t always trustworthy. With this strict criteria for truth in mind, it’s not long before - as depicted with masterful drama in his Meditations on First Philosophy - Descartes struggles to feel convinced by the existence or reliability of, well, anything. ![]() He thus decided that if there was reason to doubt the truth of something - no matter how slim the doubt - then it should be discarded as false. It’s a cool 1640 night in Leiden, Netherlands, and French philosopher René Descartes picks up his pen… “I am here quite alone,” he writes, “and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.”īut Descartes was not without reason: in his work as a mathematician, he worried that if the foundations of knowledge were not completely solid, anything built upon them would inevitably collapse. ![]()
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