Descartes First Meditation

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Descartes’ first meditation, his main objective is to present three skeptical arguments to bring doubt upon what he considers his basic beliefs. Descartes believes this to be an intricate part of his complete epistemological argument. Descartes skeptical arguments are not intended to be a denial of his basic beliefs. On the contrary, he uses these arguments to help prove one of his main theses, which is the existence of God. One of the main premises that Descartes uses in his proof for the existence of God comes from the evil demon argument, which he proposed, in the first meditation. It is this evil demon argument, which will be the topic of the following discussion. The purpose of Descartes’ evil demon argument is to …show more content…

When the situation is looked at more carefully, it can be seen that the evil demon can actually be more powerful than the God that Descartes believes exists. If that is the case then there is the possibility that God really does not exist, for the evil demon could just be deceiving Descartes’ mind into believing that a God exists. Therefore, since Descartes assumes the existence of God and by using his own evil demon argument, it can be proven that God does not exist, there is a contradiction in his argument. Descartes though could easily avoid this contradiction by saying that God is also all-powerful. Meaning nothing can be more powerful than God, considering Descartes already believes God to be omnipotent and supremely good, being all-powerful does not seem to be too much of a stretch. However, this argument could end up being never ending when one is talking about which supernatural being is more powerful than another one. Nonetheless putting aside Descartes somewhat circular reasoning, his arguments for doubting his basic beliefs, are very strong and convincing. When analyzing Descartes’ evil demon argument it is important to keep in mind his initial goal, which was to establish a certain amount of doubt into the beliefs which he took for granted, such as the existence of the external world. So he would be able to disprove these doubts in order to prove his original beliefs. Looking

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