Descartes Arguments Of Virtue

a. Descartes has doubts about all of his former opinions and the entire edifice built upon them and goes on a search for a new foundation in sciences. He rejects everything he was received, taught or believed. Anything that is not entirely certain and indubitable is to be is to be rejected as false. There is doubt about knowledge through senses because they can be deceiving. But some things are certain. The argument of the dream focuses on common sense certainties. We have similar representations while sleeping. This helps Descartes to reject them as doubtful. Dreams have a corporeal nature in general and its extension and the figure of extended things, their quality and magnitude in number, and the time measuring their duration. The only indubitable
disciplines are arithmetic, geometry and disciplines of the kind treating things that are very simple and very general regardless of their existence in real world. Rejecting time and space, Descartes rejects physics, astronomy, medicine and others dealing with composite things as doubtful dealing with extension.
b. Descartes first proposition considered certain was “I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it; or that I mentally conceive it.” The “I” however, is not a res extensa. It is rather a pure res cogitans, which is a thinking thing. A reformulation of his cogito ergo sum. This is the new departing point for western dualism. Res cogitans is a thing that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, imagines and feels. It’s pure consciousness. Descartes restores what he previously rejected that pure thinking is meaningless, thinking is thinking something in the real world, in the res extensa; consciousness is consciousness of something and consciousness is always intentional.
c. What is conceived clearly and distinctly is true. This criterion helps enquire into the existence of god; an existential question, not a mere intellectual exercise. All knowledge rests on the truthfulness of god, as the ultimate grounding of knowledge; for moderns, in the absence of god, there would be no certainty. He uses different modes of knowing: imagination, volitions, affections and judgments. Imagination, volition and affections cannot be false, only judgments can be false.
3) Webster defines virtue as morally good behavior or character.
Aristotle’s account of happiness agrees with people who say that happiness is virtue, or arête. “Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends of defect (…) Hence, in respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right an extreme.” Happiness is a certain sort of activity of the soul in accordance with virtue (and hence not a result of fortune or any other type of good), but it requires complete virtue and complete life. “Since happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue, we must consider the nature of virtue; for perhaps we shall thus see better the nature of happiness. The student of politics too is thought to have studied virtue above all things; for he wishes to make his fellow citizens good and obedient to the laws. “ The two different types of virtues are of thought: intellectual; and of character: moral. Intellectual virtues are acquired through teaching; they need experience and time. Moral virtues result from habit (ethos). None of the moral virtues arise in us naturally. “For if something is by nature in one condition, habituation cannot bring it into another condition.” “Virtues arise in us neither by nature nor against nature.” Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them and we are completed through habit. By doing virtuous actions, we acquire the activity of them: we become just by doing just actions; temperate by temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions. A person should have certain virtues of character to lead an ethical life. They include courage/bravery about feelings, temperance/moderation about
pleasure and pain, generosity/openhandedness/liberality about money, generosity on a large scale, magnanimity/proper pride about honor, truthfulness/truth-telling, wit, and friendliness. All of these characteristics are virtues that stand in the perfect center between the excessiveness and deficiency – this is the epitome of a virtue.