Rene Descartes Dream Argument

Rene Descartes was born in La Haye, Touraine, France in 1596 to mother Jeanne Brochard and father Joachim Descartes. At four days old, René was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church of Saint George in his home village. Before he was one year old, his mother died, leaving his father to send Rene and his two older siblings to live with their grandmother.
When he was eight years old Rene was sent to school for seven years at the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche and became a boarder there at age eleven. Although he was said to be a talented and well-behaved student, it has been speculated that Descartes may have been ill and therefore didn’t have to follow the complete schedule and could stay in bed later. At school he studied rhetoric
This means that what we see, hear and experience might not actually be what is out there and it’s all an illusion.
One of his arguments used to prove this is called the dream argument. He argues that dreams seem real when really you are asleep and nothing is happening. In a dream he had, he said he sits by a fire and can feel the warmth of the flames, just the same as when he is awake. However, in reality there is no fire and he cannot really feel it as he is asleep. This assists the main argument as it shows that if our senses convey something when it’s not there, how can we trust our senses when we are awake and think it is.
Another argument to prove this is the ‘Deceiving God and Evil Demon arguments’. In this Descartes says that it is possible that we are under the control of an all-powerful being bent on deceiving us. This would mean that humans have no bodies and are just brains that are fed information and illusions by the being. Nevertheless, the arguments are not meant to be taken completely literally but as metaphors to show that senses can be deceived and not to take everything that they convey as fully certain. To conclude this idea, our senses may not always show us what is real but a version of it or even an
He argued that the one thing he couldn’t doubt was the fact that he was thinking. He came up with the famous phrase: ‘I think therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum in Latin). Descartes used this idea as a basis for working out what we can know for certain. He thought that if you broke down all problems to the simplest possible parts, the parts that depend least on our senses, then we can understand how reality works. For Descartes, mathematics was the most abstract method and therefore the most reliable way of understanding