Descartes Epistemology Essay

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In this essay I intend to critically analyse the role of God in Descartes epistemology and ultimately illustrate the flaws in Descartes’ attempt to use God to explain the attainment of knowledge. The focus of this analysis will be on the ‘Meditation of First philosophy’. I will, illustrate the flawed reasoning within his arguments through my own observations of the text and secondary sources. First I will look at Descartes aim within the meditations, secondly, his use of God to dispel the evil deceiver possibility, before arguing that Descartes was unsuccessful in his attempt to use God as a foundation for his epistemology through analysing and critiquing Descartes two primary arguments for the existence of God and his role in the attainment of knowledge.
Aim/outline
In the Meditations, Descartes claims that up until this point, he had accepted knowledge obtained through or from the senses as being true, the error in this he claims is that, we really know nothing to absolutely exist and therefore we cannot accept any a posteriori knowledge to be true( ). Rene Descartes’ core purposes that underlay his written treatise, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ was to, through the character of ‘The Meditator’, use a radicalised scepticism known as Cartesian scepticism or Hyperbolic doubt to seek truth, establish certainty and, separate philosophy from God and the bible to create a rational method of inquiry and ultimately ‘base all knowledge on a metaphysical foundation’ (Cottingham, 1993, p 18). He did not seek to eliminate a belief in God, quite contrarily; God played one of the most essential roles in Descartes epistemic theory.
Before we can establish anything it is important to understand that Descartes explains God in terms of the...

... middle of paper ...

... to be proved (Cottingham, 1996, p 95). This logical leap may be over looked however due to the fact that this is an entirely illogical argument. Even with this inability to disprove Descartes conclusion, it is quite simple to fault his method. Which leads us to my next and perhaps the most famous objection to the ontological argument, Immanuel Kant’s Doctrine that ‘existence is not a predicate’ ( ) in reply to Anselm’s claims that the existence of God. Essentially, Descartes uses existence
So let’s look at the evidence, essentially Descartes uses a chain of arguments to prove the existence of a supremely perfect being, whom is not a has the necessary characteristic of existence within it’s very definition. He then attempts to use this Doctrine to explain his entire epistemic project of finding a truth criterion for the attainment of absolute knowledge. This leads

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