Meditations on First Philosophy

Think about the role of body. Is body an integral aspect of knowing God clearly and distinctly? Can the body be known only in relation to the mind? Do you agree with Descartes’s conclusion that external objects can be known clearly and distinctly insofar as they are objects of pure mathematics?

Analyze Descartes’s wax experiment. How does this experiment allow him to distinguish between perceivable attributes of a substance and the imperceivable objectivity within the substance? How is continuity retained if our senses are easily deceived? Think about the role of God in relation to the particular and universal dichotomy.

Does Descartes ever truly doubt the existence of a supremely perfect being? Analyze the role of the evil genius. Why might this intellectual move be a strategic one given the religious climate of his time?

Descartes states that, despite God equipping us with perfect faculties of the mind, error arises out of the will allowing the subject to reach uninformed judgments. What are other faculties of the mind? How do they constitute our thoughts? Do all of them present clear and distinct knowledge?

Think about the lasting effects of Descartes’s mind/body dualism on Western philosophy. What are its cultural implications? Where do you see this dichotomy upheld in the present day or among other modern philosophers? How might one critique this dualism?

Mathematics plays a crucial role in Descartes’s philosophy yet remains in the background of his meditations. How are ideas of God and mathematics similar? Is his argument made more convincing if we take math to be indistinguishable from God and as that by which substance can be explicitly known? Think about which modes of substance pertain to mathematics and which pertain to the soul.

Descartes describes the senses as able to deceive due to substances undergoing infinite change. Yet, nature instills in the subject adventitious knowledge that must be accepted if we are to care for our bodies. Does Descartes fall into an instrumentalist reading of the senses? Why may this reading of the senses be problematic?

Descartes’s argument for the existence of God is that we can conceive of something more perfect than us, an idea that was necessarily placed in us by God himself. How does this relate to the cosmological argument? Does Descartes attempt to differentiate his view from this argument in any way? Compare and contrast the cosmological argument with Descartes’s argument for the existence of God.