Meditations on First Philosophy, by Rene Descartes

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In Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, he talks about the distinction between God and existence. This paper is going to argue that in Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, both are contrasting how we know that God really exists and how we know what we perceive in this world actually exists as well.
This essay will start by talking all about Rene Descartes and his ideas around the existence of God and life itself with everything living in it.
Rene Descartes is putting forward an argument that everything we perceive in life is true when he says; “And thus I now seem able to posit as a general rule that everything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true” (Descartes, 24). A human being is always constantly thinking about things in life. Rene Descartes studied things that humans can sense and imagine. He came up with the idea of how do we know something we imagined actually happened and we did not dream it. Rene Descartes wrote this book to discover how we are constantly imagining and sensing things throughout our life; how we perceive it to be true, and how do we know that it is. He also questions how we can know that God really exists.
Rene Descartes book, Meditations on First Philosophy, was an interesting read. A lot of people have thought how do we know God really does exist without any proof of the fact? Descartes questions God’s existence when he says; “And certainly, because I have no reason for thinking that there is a God who is a deceiver (and of course I do not yet sufficiently know whether there is a God)” (Descartes, 25).I have heard people ask that question a lot. I have not ever heard, how do we know we are not just imaging everything in life...

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...in God you cannot understand because there is not enough evidence to fully understand God.
This essay showed us how Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes thought differently about both the existence of life and God. Rene believed that there are no limits to God. Whereas, Thomas believed you could believe but not understand God. Rene showed us how we are constantly thinking about things even when we are imagining things that are not real and how do we know if anything even exists. Whereas, Thomas disagrees with him by thinking that we should not get our minds imagining things that are not real because it is a waste of our thinking.

Works Cited
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 1993. Print.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. A. P. Martinich and Brian Battiste. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2011. Print.

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