Analyzing Descartes's First Meditation: A Critical Perspective

For this module four case assignment, I will be discussing various aspects of Descartes’s meditations, focusing primarily on his first meditation on doubting the senses. In order to accomplish this, I will take a side as to if I believe that this is actually a good argument, or if it is flawed and should not be trusted. After looking deeply into his argument, I will then discuss what I deem to be appealing about his statements and his beliefs. Contrary to this, I will also briefly discuss the teachings in his works that I find less that appealing and even leaning more towards the odd side. With these points accomplished, I will have a better understanding of what Descartes truly meant in his passage about his first meditation. With any

Dreams. He shows us that dreams are formed from our senses. Everything we see, smell, feel and hear in reality are cast to our dreams. In these dreams we sense that we are somewhere where in our waking state we are not. We believe that we have arrived to a place, or are with another, and at the time of our dreaming, it seems as though it is reality. How though, does one make the definition between dream and reality? If a dream seems so real, how are we so sure that what we perceive as real isn’t just a dream. Descartes made this observation while sitting in his chain in front of his fire and stated, “How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality I was lying undressed in bed?” (Descartes, 1641). How can one discern between reality and a dream, when they are both identical? Descartes has been in the same spot in a dream and in reality with no way to determine which is which. The trouble here comes from the aforementioned fact that everything that occurs in our dreams is held true in reality as it is reality which molds the dream. He elaborates on this by asserting that if he sleeps or is awake, “two and three together always form five, and the square can never have more than four sides, and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be suspected of any falsity” (Descartes, 1641). Although it may seem that there can be no uncertainty from such seemingly true and infallible ideas, the mere fact that these “truths” occur within our dreams, which are a falsity, lead us to see that there can in fact be doubt attached to them, and that we cannot truly trust our