An Examination of the Second Meditation of Descartes :: Essays Papers

An Examination of the Second Meditation of DescartesBaird and Kaufmann, the editors of our text, explain in their outline of Descartes epistemology that the method by which the psyche carried out his philosophical work involved first discovering and being sure of a certainty, and then, from that certainty, reasoning what else it meant one could be sure of. He would admit nonentity without being absolutely satisfied on his own (i.e., without being told so by others) that it was incontrovertible truth. This system was unique, according to the editors, in part because Descartes was not panic-stricken to face uncertainty. Despite the fact that it was precisely doubt of which he was endeavoring to rid himself, he nonetheless allowed it the full reign it deserved and demanded over his intellectual labors. Although skepticism and doubt were the enemies, say Baird and Kaufmann (p.16), Descartes hit upon the idea of using doubt as a tool or as a weapon. . . . He would use doubt as an aci d to pour over every truth to see if there was anything that could not be dissolved . . . . This test, they explain, resulted for Descartes in the conclusion that, if he doubted everything in the initiation there was to doubt, it was still then certain that he was doubting further, that in order to doubt, he had to exist. His own existence, therefore, was the first truth he could admit to with certainty, and it became the soil for the remainder of his epistemology.In his Synopsis of the Following Six Meditations, Descartes writes the longest paragraph by far on the Second Meditation. This is hardly surprising, since it is the one most slender to his methodology -- the one without which, his entire system of reasoning would collapse. In the first sentence of it, he presents exactly that conclusion which, as we have just seen, Baird and Kaufmann discussed In the Second Meditation, he says (p. 23), the attend uses its own freedom and supposes the non-existence of all things about w hose existence it can have even the slightest doubt and in so doing the mind notices that it is impossible that it should not itself exist during this time. He goes on to say that this will enable the mind to distinguish itself from the body. At this point he spends a soundly deal of space speaking of exactly why he will not attempt to prove the immortality of the soul in this section, though perhaps roughly of his audience might have expected him to.