Research Paper On Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes’ is one of the most well-known philosophers and is very famous for his works. He was the youngest out of the three kids and was born in France on March 31, 1956 (Skirry 1). In his earlier years, he was raised by his grandmother along with his brother and sister. He began school at the Jesuit College of La Fleche at the age of ten and finished by the age of eighteen. According to Descartes’ “only the children of nobility attended the Jesuit College of La Fleche and that it was one of the best schools in the 17th century in Europe” (Rene 1). Soon after finishing school, Rene Descartes’ spent a lot of his time traveling the world. Once he finished his adventures, Descartes’ spent the rest of his life writing and studying philosophy.

The meditator also explains how his senses have deceived him in the past, so he cannot fully count on them. After he explains how our senses can mislead us, he thinks about how in some situations that he is in, that he could not possibly doubt it. When he is “sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding a piece of paper in his hands, how could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are his” (Feinberg 242)? From this statement, he puts together his thoughts and realizes that there is no way that he can prove that he does not own his body. The meditator also becomes aware of the fact that his doubts of the ownership of his own self will be impractical. One of his most famous arguments is known as the Dream Argument. During his explanation of this argument, the meditator tries to identify the difference between imagination and knowledge. Descartes’ meditator often claims that “he is convinced that he is in his dressing-gown, sitting by the fire. When in fact, he is lying undressed in bed” (Feinberg 243). Not only has he had encounters of thinking that he was awake, but was actually asleep, he has also experienced himself believing that he was sleeping, but was indeed awake. The mediator becomes aware of the fact that he is awake by “looking at a piece of paper, shaking his head, stretching out and reaching for his hand deliberately

He discovers that these statements can also be very difficult to find untrue. Even though he knows that this equation (2 + 5 = 7) is certain to be true, the meditator feels like it can be doubted. From what he is feeling, he believes that there is “a God that could have given him a nature such that he was deceived even in matters which seemed most evident” (Feinberg 249). This leads to him creating the Deceiving God Argument. He holds the deceiving God or the malicious demon responsible for everything he has ever doubted. At this time, he does not know for a fact if there is a God, so that is the next point he will try to prove. Even though Descartes’ meditator does not know if there is, in fact, a God or a deceiving God, he makes it clear that he will not let him bring down his emotions. He states: “let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something” (Feinberg 250). In other words, the meditator explains that he will never let anything unknown cause him to feel different about himself, let alone bring himself down. After what he believes to be a deceiving God evaluating him, he decides to “call all of his previous beliefs into doubt and classify any of his thoughts that will even come close to being doubted and identify them as being false” (Skirry 20). By making this decision,