René Desca rtes’
Meditations on First Philosophy
(Com plete Notes)
1st Meditation : Skeptical Dou bts
Sum m ar y
The First Meditation, subtitled "What can be called into doubt," opens with the
Meditator reflecting on the number of falsehoods he has believed during his life and on
the subsequent faultiness of the body of knowledge he has built up from these
falsehoods. He has resolved to sweep away all he thinks he knows and to start again
from the foundations, building up his knowledge once more on more certain grounds.
He has seated himself alone, by the fire, free of all worries so that he can demolish his
former opinions with care.
The Meditator reasons that he need only find some reason to doubt his present opinions
in order to prompt him to seek sturdier foundations for his knowledge. Rather than
doubt every one of his opinions individually, he reasons that he might cast them all into
doubt if he can doubt the foundations and basic principles upon which his opinions are
founded.
Everything that the Meditator has accepted as most true he has come to learn from or
through his senses. He acknowledges that sometimes the senses can deceive, but only
with respect to objects that are very small or far away, and that our sensory knowledge
on the whole is quite sturdy. The Meditator acknowledges that insane people might be
more deceived, but that he is clearly not one of them and needn't worry himself about
that.
However, the Meditator realizes that he is often convinced when he is dreaming that he
is sensing real objects. He feels certain that he is awake and sitting by the fire, but
reflects that often he has dreamed this very sort of thing and been wholly convinced by
it. Though his present sensations may be dream images, he suggests that even dream
images are drawn from waking experience, much like paintings in that respect. Even
when a painter creates an imaginary creature, like a mermaid, the composite parts are
drawn from real things—women and fish, in the case of a mermaid. And even when a
painter creates something entirely new, at least the colors in the painting are drawn
from real experience. Thus, the Meditator concludes, though he can doubt composite
things, he cannot doubt the simple and universal parts from which they are constructed
like shape, quantity, size, time, etc. While we can doubt studies based on composite
,things, like medicine, astronomy, or physics, he concludes that we cannot doubt studies
based on simple things, like arithmetic and geometry.
On further reflection, the Meditator realizes that even simple things can be doubted.
Omnipotent God could make even our conception of mathematics false. One might
argue that God is supremely good and would not lead him to believe falsely all these
things. But by this reasoning we should think that God would not deceive him with
regard to anything, and yet this is clearly not true. If we suppose there is no God, then
there is even greater likelihood of being deceived, since our imperfect senses would not
have been created by a perfect being.
The Meditator finds it almost impossible to keep his habitual opinions and assumptions
out of his head, try as he might. He resolves to pretend that these opinions are totally
false and imaginary in order to counter-balance his habitual way of thinking. He
supposes that not God, but some evil demon has committed itself to deceiving him so
that everything he thinks he knows is false. By doubting everything, he can at least be
sure not to be misled into falsehood by this demon.
An alysis
The First Meditation is usually approached in one of two ways. First, it can be read as
setting the groundwork for the meditations that follow, where doubt is employed as a
powerful tool against Aristotelian philosophy. Second, it can, and often is, read standing
on its own as the foundation of modern skepticism. We will briefly discuss these
complementary readings in turn.
Descartes saw Meditations on First Philosophy as providing the metaphysical
underpinning of his new physics. Like Galileo, he sought to overturn two-thousand-
year-old prejudices injected into the Western tradition by Aristotle. The Aristotelian
thought of Descartes' day placed a great weight on the testimony of the senses,
suggesting that all knowledge comes from the senses. The Meditator's suggestion that all
one's most certain knowledge comes from the senses is meant to appeal directly to the
Aristotelian philosophers who will be reading Meditations on First Philosophy. The
motivation, then, behind the First Meditation is to start in a position the Aristotelian
philosophers would agree with and then, subtly, to seduce them away from it. Descartes
is aware of how revolutionary his ideas are, and must pay lip service to the orthodox
opinions of the day in order to be heeded.
Reading the First Meditation as an effort to coax Aristotelians away from their
customary opinions allows us to read different interpretations into the different stages
of doubt. For instance, there is some debate as to whether Descartes intended his
famous "Dream Argument" to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming—that
though there is waking experience, I can never know which moments are dreams and
,which are waking—or the possibility of a universal dream—that my whole life is a dream
and that there is no waking world.
If we read Descartes as suggesting the universal possibility of dreaming, we can explain
an important distinction between the Dream Argument and the later "Evil Demon
Argument." The latter suggests that all we know is false and that we cannot trust the
senses one bit. The Dream Argument, if meant to suggest the universal possibility of
dreaming, suggests only that the senses are not always and wholly reliable. The Dream
Argument questions Aristotelian epistemology, while the Evil Demon Argument does
away with it altogether. The "Painter's Analogy," which draws on the Dream Argument,
concludes that mathematics and other purely cerebral studies are far more certain than
astronomy or physics, which is an important step away from the Aristotelian reliance on
the senses and toward Cartesian rationalism.
Meditations on First Philosophy can be seen to follow the model of St. Ignatius of
Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. The first step in the Jesuit exercises is to purge oneself of
one's attachment to the material, sinful world. In the First Meditation, Descartes leads
us through a similar purgation, though with a different purpose. Here he wants to
persuade his Aristotelian readers to purge themselves of their prejudices. He also hopes
to lead the mind away from the senses that are so heavily relied upon by the
Aristotelians. In the meditations that follow, he will argue that our most certain
knowledge comes from the mind unaided by the senses. Lastly, this process of radical
doubt will hopefully rule out any doubts from the positive claims Descartes will build up
in the next five meditations. Read in the wider context of the Meditations, these
skeptical doubts are a means to the end of preparing a resistant audience to the
metaphysics Descartes plans to build.
Read on its own, the First Meditation can be seen as presenting skeptical doubts as a
subject of study in their own right. Certainly, skepticism is a much discussed and hotly
debated topic in philosophy, even today. Descartes was the first to raise the mystifying
question of how we can claim to know with certainty anything about the world around
us. The idea is not that these doubts are probable, but that their possibility can never be
entirely ruled out. And if we can never be certain, how can we claim to know anything?
Skepticism cuts straight to the heart of the Western philosophical enterprise and its
attempt to provide a certain foundation for our knowledge and understanding of the
world. It can even be pushed so far as to be read as a challenge to our very notion of
rationality.
No one actually lives skepticism—no one actually doubts whether other people really
exist—but it is very difficult to justify a dismissal of skepticism. Western philosophy
since Descartes has been largely marked and motivated by an effort to overcome this
, problem. Particularly interesting responses can be found in Hume, Kant, and
Wittgenstein.
We should note that Descartes's doubt is a methodological and rational doubt. That is,
the Meditator is not just doubting everything at random, but is providing solid reasons
for his doubt at each stage. For instance, he rejects the possibility that he might be mad,
since that would undercut the rationality that motivates his doubt. Descartes is trying to
set up this doubt within a rational framework, and needs to maintain a claim to
rationality for his arguments to proceed.
2n d Meditation , Par t 1: Cogito er go su m & Su m r es cogitan s
Sum m ar y
The Second Meditation is subtitled "The nature of the human mind, and how it is better
known than the body" and takes place the day after the First Meditation. The Meditator
is firm in his resolve to continue his search for certainty and to discard as false anything
that is open to the slightest doubt. He recalls Archimedes' famous saying that he could
shift the entire earth given one immovable point: similarly, he hopes to achieve great
things if he can be certain of just one thing. Recalling the previous meditation, he
supposes that what he sees does not exist, that his memory is faulty, that he has no
senses and no body, that extension, movement and place are mistaken notions. Perhaps,
he remarks, the only certain thing remaining is that there is no certainty.
Then, he wonders, is not he, the source of these meditations, not something? He has
conceded that he has no senses and no body, but does that mean he cannot exist either?
He has also noted that the physical world does not exist, which might also seem to imply
his nonexistence. And yet to have these doubts, he must exist. For an evil demon to
mislead him in all these insidious ways, he must exist in order to be misled. There must
be an "I" that can doubt, be deceived, and so on. He formulates the
famous cogito argument, saying: "So after considering everything very thoroughly, I
must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it
is put forward by me or conceived in my mind."
The Meditator's next question, then, is what this "I" that exists is. He initially thought
that he had a soul, by means of which he was nourished, moved, could sense and think;
and also that he had a body. All these attributes have been cast into doubt, except one:
he cannot doubt that he thinks. He may exist without any other of the above attributes,
but he cannot exist if he does not think. Further, he only exists as long as he is thinking.
Therefore, thought above all else is inseparable from being. The Meditator concludes
that, in the strict sense, he is only a thing that thinks.
Meditations on First Philosophy
(Com plete Notes)
1st Meditation : Skeptical Dou bts
Sum m ar y
The First Meditation, subtitled "What can be called into doubt," opens with the
Meditator reflecting on the number of falsehoods he has believed during his life and on
the subsequent faultiness of the body of knowledge he has built up from these
falsehoods. He has resolved to sweep away all he thinks he knows and to start again
from the foundations, building up his knowledge once more on more certain grounds.
He has seated himself alone, by the fire, free of all worries so that he can demolish his
former opinions with care.
The Meditator reasons that he need only find some reason to doubt his present opinions
in order to prompt him to seek sturdier foundations for his knowledge. Rather than
doubt every one of his opinions individually, he reasons that he might cast them all into
doubt if he can doubt the foundations and basic principles upon which his opinions are
founded.
Everything that the Meditator has accepted as most true he has come to learn from or
through his senses. He acknowledges that sometimes the senses can deceive, but only
with respect to objects that are very small or far away, and that our sensory knowledge
on the whole is quite sturdy. The Meditator acknowledges that insane people might be
more deceived, but that he is clearly not one of them and needn't worry himself about
that.
However, the Meditator realizes that he is often convinced when he is dreaming that he
is sensing real objects. He feels certain that he is awake and sitting by the fire, but
reflects that often he has dreamed this very sort of thing and been wholly convinced by
it. Though his present sensations may be dream images, he suggests that even dream
images are drawn from waking experience, much like paintings in that respect. Even
when a painter creates an imaginary creature, like a mermaid, the composite parts are
drawn from real things—women and fish, in the case of a mermaid. And even when a
painter creates something entirely new, at least the colors in the painting are drawn
from real experience. Thus, the Meditator concludes, though he can doubt composite
things, he cannot doubt the simple and universal parts from which they are constructed
like shape, quantity, size, time, etc. While we can doubt studies based on composite
,things, like medicine, astronomy, or physics, he concludes that we cannot doubt studies
based on simple things, like arithmetic and geometry.
On further reflection, the Meditator realizes that even simple things can be doubted.
Omnipotent God could make even our conception of mathematics false. One might
argue that God is supremely good and would not lead him to believe falsely all these
things. But by this reasoning we should think that God would not deceive him with
regard to anything, and yet this is clearly not true. If we suppose there is no God, then
there is even greater likelihood of being deceived, since our imperfect senses would not
have been created by a perfect being.
The Meditator finds it almost impossible to keep his habitual opinions and assumptions
out of his head, try as he might. He resolves to pretend that these opinions are totally
false and imaginary in order to counter-balance his habitual way of thinking. He
supposes that not God, but some evil demon has committed itself to deceiving him so
that everything he thinks he knows is false. By doubting everything, he can at least be
sure not to be misled into falsehood by this demon.
An alysis
The First Meditation is usually approached in one of two ways. First, it can be read as
setting the groundwork for the meditations that follow, where doubt is employed as a
powerful tool against Aristotelian philosophy. Second, it can, and often is, read standing
on its own as the foundation of modern skepticism. We will briefly discuss these
complementary readings in turn.
Descartes saw Meditations on First Philosophy as providing the metaphysical
underpinning of his new physics. Like Galileo, he sought to overturn two-thousand-
year-old prejudices injected into the Western tradition by Aristotle. The Aristotelian
thought of Descartes' day placed a great weight on the testimony of the senses,
suggesting that all knowledge comes from the senses. The Meditator's suggestion that all
one's most certain knowledge comes from the senses is meant to appeal directly to the
Aristotelian philosophers who will be reading Meditations on First Philosophy. The
motivation, then, behind the First Meditation is to start in a position the Aristotelian
philosophers would agree with and then, subtly, to seduce them away from it. Descartes
is aware of how revolutionary his ideas are, and must pay lip service to the orthodox
opinions of the day in order to be heeded.
Reading the First Meditation as an effort to coax Aristotelians away from their
customary opinions allows us to read different interpretations into the different stages
of doubt. For instance, there is some debate as to whether Descartes intended his
famous "Dream Argument" to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming—that
though there is waking experience, I can never know which moments are dreams and
,which are waking—or the possibility of a universal dream—that my whole life is a dream
and that there is no waking world.
If we read Descartes as suggesting the universal possibility of dreaming, we can explain
an important distinction between the Dream Argument and the later "Evil Demon
Argument." The latter suggests that all we know is false and that we cannot trust the
senses one bit. The Dream Argument, if meant to suggest the universal possibility of
dreaming, suggests only that the senses are not always and wholly reliable. The Dream
Argument questions Aristotelian epistemology, while the Evil Demon Argument does
away with it altogether. The "Painter's Analogy," which draws on the Dream Argument,
concludes that mathematics and other purely cerebral studies are far more certain than
astronomy or physics, which is an important step away from the Aristotelian reliance on
the senses and toward Cartesian rationalism.
Meditations on First Philosophy can be seen to follow the model of St. Ignatius of
Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. The first step in the Jesuit exercises is to purge oneself of
one's attachment to the material, sinful world. In the First Meditation, Descartes leads
us through a similar purgation, though with a different purpose. Here he wants to
persuade his Aristotelian readers to purge themselves of their prejudices. He also hopes
to lead the mind away from the senses that are so heavily relied upon by the
Aristotelians. In the meditations that follow, he will argue that our most certain
knowledge comes from the mind unaided by the senses. Lastly, this process of radical
doubt will hopefully rule out any doubts from the positive claims Descartes will build up
in the next five meditations. Read in the wider context of the Meditations, these
skeptical doubts are a means to the end of preparing a resistant audience to the
metaphysics Descartes plans to build.
Read on its own, the First Meditation can be seen as presenting skeptical doubts as a
subject of study in their own right. Certainly, skepticism is a much discussed and hotly
debated topic in philosophy, even today. Descartes was the first to raise the mystifying
question of how we can claim to know with certainty anything about the world around
us. The idea is not that these doubts are probable, but that their possibility can never be
entirely ruled out. And if we can never be certain, how can we claim to know anything?
Skepticism cuts straight to the heart of the Western philosophical enterprise and its
attempt to provide a certain foundation for our knowledge and understanding of the
world. It can even be pushed so far as to be read as a challenge to our very notion of
rationality.
No one actually lives skepticism—no one actually doubts whether other people really
exist—but it is very difficult to justify a dismissal of skepticism. Western philosophy
since Descartes has been largely marked and motivated by an effort to overcome this
, problem. Particularly interesting responses can be found in Hume, Kant, and
Wittgenstein.
We should note that Descartes's doubt is a methodological and rational doubt. That is,
the Meditator is not just doubting everything at random, but is providing solid reasons
for his doubt at each stage. For instance, he rejects the possibility that he might be mad,
since that would undercut the rationality that motivates his doubt. Descartes is trying to
set up this doubt within a rational framework, and needs to maintain a claim to
rationality for his arguments to proceed.
2n d Meditation , Par t 1: Cogito er go su m & Su m r es cogitan s
Sum m ar y
The Second Meditation is subtitled "The nature of the human mind, and how it is better
known than the body" and takes place the day after the First Meditation. The Meditator
is firm in his resolve to continue his search for certainty and to discard as false anything
that is open to the slightest doubt. He recalls Archimedes' famous saying that he could
shift the entire earth given one immovable point: similarly, he hopes to achieve great
things if he can be certain of just one thing. Recalling the previous meditation, he
supposes that what he sees does not exist, that his memory is faulty, that he has no
senses and no body, that extension, movement and place are mistaken notions. Perhaps,
he remarks, the only certain thing remaining is that there is no certainty.
Then, he wonders, is not he, the source of these meditations, not something? He has
conceded that he has no senses and no body, but does that mean he cannot exist either?
He has also noted that the physical world does not exist, which might also seem to imply
his nonexistence. And yet to have these doubts, he must exist. For an evil demon to
mislead him in all these insidious ways, he must exist in order to be misled. There must
be an "I" that can doubt, be deceived, and so on. He formulates the
famous cogito argument, saying: "So after considering everything very thoroughly, I
must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it
is put forward by me or conceived in my mind."
The Meditator's next question, then, is what this "I" that exists is. He initially thought
that he had a soul, by means of which he was nourished, moved, could sense and think;
and also that he had a body. All these attributes have been cast into doubt, except one:
he cannot doubt that he thinks. He may exist without any other of the above attributes,
but he cannot exist if he does not think. Further, he only exists as long as he is thinking.
Therefore, thought above all else is inseparable from being. The Meditator concludes
that, in the strict sense, he is only a thing that thinks.
