Summary Of Rene Descartes Meditation On First Philosophy

Rene Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy uses philosophical understanding to establish the absolute realities of the world. Through a series of philosophical questions, he establishes the foundation of the mind, God, materials, and imagination. He uses skepticism to explain the philosophical investigation of each. The general idea behind the meditation was to demonstrate the existence of God, the immortal idea of knowledge or the soul, and the separation between mind and body. Descartes wrote as though he meditated on each topic for one day. Beginning the first day with doubt which discards all beliefs that can be doubted. The next day he concludes that people are thinking things, in turn “I am a mind”. Day three Descartes establishes that God is real because something cannot come from nothing, and nothing less than God can be responsible for the perfect idea of God. Day four Descartes explains that God did not make us flawed but instead made us free, and morally responsible the only way to avoid error is to withhold judgement until certain. Day five Descartes explains how all things that exist depend on God, but the only way to prove God’s existence is philosophy. The last day, day 6 Descartes states that reality is separated into two realms, mind and body, an idea referred to as Dualism.
Overall philosophy can be divided into two realms of reality, the mind and the body These two philosophies are known as dualism, they are two separate realities that share no commonality. The mind is composed of the imagination, will, senses and ideas. Bodies have separate properties that have nothing to do with the mind such as weight, size and the ability to move. The mind is made up of abstract things and is an abstract idea while the body is based on the tangible. There is not crossover in terms of feature of both the mind and the body they are separate