What Is Descartes'sceptical Of Our Perception Of The External World

Descartes argues throughout the meditations, that we should be sceptical of our perception of the external world, due to his belief that all of our perceptions of physical things are perceived by the senses. This is the case, Descartes argues, as our senses of the physical things in the external world can be deceived. Properties which physical things possess, can be lost, or changed. Descartes demonstrates this with a piece of hard wax, which aroused his senses in a variety of ways, including: smell, taste, touch and sound. Descartes then melts the wax, to witness the extinction of the properties he can sense. Descartes states, even though all the properties have been lost, the wax itself still remains and that since we can no longer
He thought that, physical objects must contain “intentional reality”, in that they possess the qualities of the representation of our ideas, for example, the idea of a tree is in fact intentionally true. But to say that a tree is the cause of this idea, for Descartes, is to say that the tree itself contains “formal reality”, it actually does contain the physical attributes of a tree, such as branches and bark, rather than the mental representation of branches and bark, which are less vivid. Descartes then continued to reason that, nothing which contains formal reality is capable of containing more intentional reality than its cause, as this reality would be existing from nothing, which is
To do this, Descartes asked himself, that when we think of physical objects clearly and distinctly in our minds, which properties cannot be separated from the idea of that object. Descartes discovers, that the ideas of the objects do not require properties of: “colour, taste, texture or scent”, but must have the qualities of: “shape, size, is the object in motion, or rest, place”. Therefore, Descartes concludes that the consensus which all these qualities share, is the “extension”, or volume of the material thing. They are, as Descartes puts it, “objects of pure mathematics”. In other words, the three dimensional space of which it occupies in the physical world, which must be the true essence of material