Descartes Fourth Meditation Essay

At the start of Descartes fourth meditation, there are three certainties that Descartes has so far concluded. The first being that god exists. The second that god is not a deceiver. And third that god created him and is therefore responsible for all of his faculties (which includes his faculty of judgment). The first two convictions seem sound enough to Descartes yet the third convict evokes some conflict within him. Descartes speaks about how, if everything within him comes from god, and God did not award him with a faculty for making mistakes, it would appear as if he could never go wrong. This is what is referred to as Descartes problem of error, which motivates Descartes to try and correct the two contradictory statements.

Descartes first
Surely the all-powerful God would not want him to make mistakes? Descartes provides two possible reasons as to why he was created as such. His first being that Gods creations are incomprehensible. His second is that to see the perfection of what god has created you cannot just examine one thing by itself, you have to look at the universe as a
Can somebody truly believe in something just because they will to? Descartes states that a persons intellect puts forward ideas or propositions and a persons will can chose whether or not to believe them to be true or false. As an example, if a man was cheating on his wife and the wife had undeniable proof of this, it would seem incorrect that the wife doesn’t believe him to be cheating. It is however possible that she might not change her behavior once she finds this out but that still doesn’t imply that she actually believes that he is not cheating on her. If a person would will their beliefs, it would then make sense that a person’s beliefs would be irrespective of the truth, which would not actually be representative of the reality that we live