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Rene Descartes Doubt Analysis

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Doubt is the existence of skepticism in one's thoughts, the idea of doubting is the belief that you’re views are being deceived. Descartes suspects that most things a person experiences or believes is open to doubt. Being a rationalist Descartes presumes all knowledge comes from our senses; sight, touch, hear, and smell, but with that comes doubt. Senses have been known to deceive us in many occasions, for example, our eyes may dominate our sense of hearing in some occasions and sound and sight don’t correlate in that instance. But, there is one thing that our senses can not deceive and that is that we exist. We are. We exist. In theory, we don’t know the actual difference of being asleep or awake. Nothing truly tells us whether we are always …show more content…

He was searching for something that can’t be denied or doubted which lead him to our existence. In Descartes words “Cogito, ergo som,” which translates to, I think therefore I am, we cannot doubt our existence because we are the thoughts of our life, we are the mind behind our ideas. Descartes quickly questioned his existence, but he came to one conclusion that leads him to believe he may be in existence. The first question Descartes asked himself was what is he? He is a man with “a face, hands, arms and all the other equipment… I [Descartes] move myself around, sense and think -- which I trace back to my soul (pg.160 Bartaman).” One’s soul is the life of there existence, a body with a soul has to be in existence. Let's say we are a cold soleless body, this would lead us to have an empty mind with no thoughts or ideas. A mind without thoughts is a mind that is no longer in existence. Descartes confirms this thought with a question and answer, “for how long?” “For as long as I think- for it may be that, if I completely stopped thinking, I would also cease to be(pg. 160 Bartaman).” With this evaluation we can conclude that a body with a soul is a mind with thought, “a thinking thing (pg. 161 Bartaman);” therefore, we have to exist. If we can sense, and think. Descartes states that although the what he sees with his eyes and feels with his hands can be deceived by the “evil demon,” he can’t deny that he perceives. One may say that the deceiver is trying to convince us that we don’t exist but because I am able to get deceived I must exist. To capture all the elements I have included in these two paragraphs I wish to end this analysis on one last quote from Descartes, “I seem to see, to hear and to feel. This seeming cannot be unreal, but it is what is properly called sensing; strictly speaking, sensing is just thinking (pg 161

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