Descartes 2

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

later. The
second was the scepticism that had made a sudden impact on the
intellectual world, mainly as a reaction to the scholastic
outlook. This scepticism was strongly influenced by the work of
the Pyrrhonians as handed down from antiquity by Sextus
Empiricus, which claimed that, as there is never a reason to
believe p that is better than a reason not to believe p, we
should forget about trying to discover the nature of reality and
live by appearance alone. This attitude was best exemplified in
the work of Michel de Montaigne, who mockingly dismissed the
attempts of theologians and scientists to understand the nature
of God and the universe respectively. Descartes felt the force of
sceptical arguments and, while not being sceptically disposed
himself, came to believe that scepticism towards knowledge was
the best way to discover what is certain: by applying sceptical
doubt to all our beliefs, we can discover which of them are
indubitable, and ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

his beliefs
to the strongest and most hyberbolic of doubts. He invokes the
nightmarish notion of an all-powerful, malign demon who could be
deceiving him in the realm of sensory experience, in his very
understanding of matter and even in the simplest cases of
mathematical or logical truths. The doubts may be obscure, but
this is the strength of the method - the weakness of criteria for
what makes a doubt reasonable means that almost anything can
count as a doubt, and therefore whatever withstands doubt must be
something epistemologically formidable.

In Meditation Two, Descartes hits upon the indubitable principle
he has been seeking. He exists, at least when he ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: