Descartes’ Ultimate Purpose of the Meditations

Descartes’ Ultimate Purpose of the Meditations

My initial approach to René Descartes, in Meditations on First Philosophy, views the third meditation’s attempts to prove the existence of God as a way of establishing a foundation for the existence of truth, falsity, corporeal things and eventually the establishment of the sciences. When viewed in this light, Descartes is accused of drawing himself into a ‘Cartesian circle,’ ultimately forcing this cosmological proof of God to defy Cartesian method, thus precipitating the failure of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth meditations. This approach to the meditations, in the order with which they are presented, allows me to state that a proof of the existence of God cannot hold due to its vulnerability to circularity. This does not, however, necessitate that the Meditations must fail. Rather, if the meditations are approached in the order with which Descartes originally created them, the circularity and many of the objections disappear. We must not loose sight of Descartes’ goal of these meditations: to unearth “the foundational science from which the whole system of science can be derived” (Menn 549) through which it cannot be denied that “[knowledge of God is] the most certain and evident of all possible objects of knowledge for the human intellect” (Descartes 11). “Descartes has decided that the Augustinian method of knowledge of God and soul is the way to knowledge of the physical world [science]” (Menn 549). I will demonstrate that this initial “ordered” perspective creates serious doubt of the existence of God, while a re-ordering of the Meditations produces a logically sound argument that facilitates an arrival at the intended goal while keeping the argument...

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...t of the first meditation first. Rather, the first and second meditations were conceived in hindsight, in order to support the conclusion of the third meditation with a reason that extended beyond the Holy Scripture. It is when the meditations are contemplated in numerical order that circularity arises in the third meditation.

Works Cited

Cottingham, John. Descartes. “Chapter Three: From Self to God to Knowledge of the World.” Basil Blackwell Ltd.: New York. 1986. 47-78.

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 1996.

Menn, Stephen. “The Problem of the Third Meditation.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Edited by Robert E. Wood. Volume 67. American Catholic Philosophical Association: Washington DC. 1993. 537-559.