Descartes Sixth Meditation Essay

646 Words2 Pages

Cody Rhodes
2/27/2017
Sixth Meditation: Proof of Material Objects Descartes offers four different paths that our ideas of material objects could potentially come from, but only one of these causes stands its ground and remains a plausible way for proving the existence of material objects. In the sixth meditation Descartes explains his four possible causes for his ideas of material objects. The first is that God could have directly given him the ideas of material objects, The second is that he himself could be a cause of ideas, The third is that something else (a demon or similar) could have potentially given him these ideas, and the final possible cause are material objects themselves. If we address these four different paths one by one, …show more content…

Descartes has said that God cannot deceive since he is perfect, and deceiving is a result or consequence of imperfection. In addition to this train of thought, one would realize that if God had imposed these ideas upon Descartes, that God would have provided Descartes with a way of knowing that these ideas were given to him, and due to the lack of communication from God, it appears that God has not deceived Descartes. As a real-world example of the idea that God has presupposed ideas into your mind, if you put your hand onto a hot stove, what is your first reaction both mentally and physically? Physically you realize that the stove is hot and that it hurts your hand, but in your mind do you think that God has put this idea of pain from the union of a hot stove and hand into your mind? Or do you believe that you have encountered an object that exists somewhere outside of your mind in the material world? It appears that the first case would be impossible unless you are to accuse God of deceiving you and implanting ideas. Although, if God had given us a way of acknowledging that there is some sort of divine intervention in our ideas, there would be no way we could doubt this hypothesis, but he has not, so we

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