Rene Descartes Discourse On Method And Meditations On First Philosophy

Rene Descartes’s Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the most influential and important works of modern philosophy, which explores the idea of Descartes’s ever-famous axiom “I think, therefore I am” as the foundation for everything we know about existence. His thinking, however, fails to recognize an essential conflict between the way he comes to his conclusions and what his conclusions tell him about the foundations of thought. Although Descartes claims that cognito is the basis for all other things, he creates a conflicting irony between mathematics and cogito, as the way he arrived at his claims is through the fundamentals of mathematics and mathematical proofs. In fact, while Descartes is rightfully frequently

When Descartes is reflecting on his method of proofs, he asserts that, “what pleased me most about this method was that by means of it I was assured of using my reasoning in everything, if not perfectly, at least as well as was in my power” (12). In discussing academics and thought processes, Descartes also expresses how, “[he] delighted most of all in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its reasoning” (4). Descartes’s method is math. He explains that his method of thought is successful because he was assured by “using [his] reasoning,” and earlier had asserted his affinity for mathematical reasoning for the same reasons: “certainty” and “evidence of its reasoning.” By using the words “pleased” and “delighted” in both talking about his mathematical method, and in talking about math itself, Descartes shows how comfortable he is with using math to prove his philosophical theories. Furthermore, Descartes goes on to praise math saying that he “was astonished by the fact that no one had built anything more noble upon its foundations, given that they were so solid and firm” (4-5). The use of the word “astonished” shows just how obvious it is to Descartes that mathematics should be the foundation for reasoning. ADD CONCLUDING SENTENCE

Descartes’s use of mathematical reasoning conflicts with his belief that cogito

By saying that “the human mind” would know how to find the sum based on the rules of math, Descartes is actually asserting that the mind doesn’t prove math, rather proof proves math, and the mind merely uses math as a tool for making conclusions and solving problems. On the contrary, in Descartes’s Meditation One he delves deeper into the foundations of mathematics in stating that, “arithmetic, geometry, and other such disciplines, which treat of nothing but the simplest and most general things and which are indifferent as to whether these things do or do not in fact exist, contain something certain and indubitable” (61). Descartes argues that whether we believe it or not, and whether they “do or do not in fact exist,” arithmetic and geometry do exactly what we created them to do, and therefore we cannot dispute that they exist to us. Descartes uses the word “indubitable,” demonstrating his belief that if one uses math to prove something, it is proven true but only because we have created a foundation of mathematics in our minds that we can build the proof upon. Descartes argues that the indubitability that mathematics contains is that we have assumed it to be true, therefore it is irrefutable by his theory of cogito.