Rene Descartes' First Meditation
Since the day I was born, I have constantly been presented with new information. As this new information is processed in my head, I discover new things, create new beliefs within my mind, and reach new levels of understanding. Unfortunately, I 've learned that not all the beliefs I hold are based on fact. I often misunderstand the facts or confuse the ideas that I already possess. When I was young, I often believed certain things to be fact, merely because my elders had told me so, that I now recognize to be false. In my own philosophical thinking, how many of those beliefs remain undiscovered to me to this day, and what impact have they made on my life? René Descartes (1596-1650) recognized that this influence of false beliefs could impair his scientific investigations, producing possible false conclusions to his thinking. Therefore, he "realized that it was necessary, once in the course of [my] life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if [I] wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last." Descartes began his philosophical career by trying to provide a sound basis for the new scientific method that was being developed, but at the same time he wished to show that this new scientific methodology was consistent with Christianity. It was because of this that Descartes began his Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes ' overarching goal in the Meditations can be viewed as "a search of a complete system of knowledge, in which [he] would prove the existence of God, understand the nature of the human mind, and establish the principle on which the material universe can be studied." Descartes First Meditation: What Can be Called into Doubt is the first of the six total meditations. He opens this meditation by restating his desire to have only true beliefs. He proposes to systematically follow a process of skeptic doubt. His doubt is not one of simply common sense, though,
Cited: Guttenplan, Hornsby, and Janaway. Reading Philosophy. "Doubt." Pgs. 6-17. 2003