🟢| K&D - Descartes Meditation 3 Flashcards
(9 cards)
1
Q
Descartes’ position
2
A
- Meditation 3’s purpose is to fulfill his aim of proving God
- Descartes will continue on his current path and will ‘attempt to render myself gradually better known and more familiar to myself’
2
Q
Components
2
A
- Clear & Distinct Rule
- Trademark Argument
3
Q
Clear & Distinct Rule:
Evaluation of Cogito
5
A
- Descartes has found just one piece of certain knowledge so far, but or this to be a useful foundation he needed to be able to build something on it - this wouldn’t be easy
- Descartes was determined to ‘admit nothing that is not necessarily true’, and all he knew necessarily was that he was ‘a thing that thinks.’
- Descartes spent some time analysing the cogito to identify what was special about it and found that it had a distinguishing feature – what makes the cogito certain is that Descartes claimed to have a ‘clear and distinct’ perception of it
- By the term perception, Descartes is not referring to sensory perception but what the mind does when it becomes aware of simple truths
- Because of Descartes’ claim that it is logically impossible to doubt the cogito, he argued that whatever else he understood clearly and distinctly must also be true
4
Q
Clear & Distinct Rule:
Definition
4
A
- Knowledge that is clear is present to the attentive mind, meaning you can think it
- Knowledge that is distinct is not confused with anything that is not clear, and there is no reliance on other knowledge
- Example of a clear and distinct idea that Descartes gives is ‘what is done cannot be undone’.
- To demonstrate the difference between clear and distinct knowledge, we can consider pain - pain is clear since we can think of its feeling, but it is not distinct since it has an underlying cause. (e.g. we may feel pain because we have broken our ankle which has spread the feeling of pain around the body)
5
Q
Clear & Distinct Rule:
Purpose
3
A
- Descartes claims that the most important mark of any knowledge claim is that it must be founded on a clear and distinct perception.
- If the cogito can be considered Descartes’ foundation of knowledge, the clear and distinct rule is going to be the thing that allowed him to build upon this foundation
- Before Descartes can build on his certain foundation he must attempt to remove the evil deceiver from our minds, as he previously thought certainties of maths and the existence of an outside world were clear and distinct perceptions but the evil demon caused him to doubt them
6
Q
Trademark Argument:
Beginnings
3
A
- To deal with the issues raised by the evil demon hypothesis, Descartes’ strategy was to prove that a perfect God exists
- Descartes was interested in certainty, so he would not be satisfied with a strongly held belief in God but a certainty that God must exist
- He wanted to find out whether he could know God exists a priori
7
Q
Trademark Argument:
Part 1
4
A
- Manages to establish a certain God using his mind alone
- Descartes has an idea of a perfect being, and at the same time knows that he is imperfect
- To understand our own imperfection, we must first have an idea of a perfect being and Descartes believes this to be true for all humans
- Descartes says that it is self-evident that nothing will come from nothing, so the idea of a perfect being must have a cause
8
Q
Trademark Argument:
Part 2
2
A
- The Causal Adequacy Principle states that the cause of something must be sufficient to produce its effect, so an imperfect mind is clearly not sufficient to produce the idea of perfection
- This means that we cannot be the cause of this idea of perfection because we are imperfect, so there must exist a perfect being who placed this idea in our mind – they have left a trademark of perfection on our mind
9
Q
Trademark Argument:
Part 3 (Conclusion)
2
A
- Only God, the perfect being, could be the cause of this idea, proving that God necessarily exists
- Deception would depend on some defect, so God, the perfect being, cannot be a deceiver
