A Deconstruction of Rene Descartes' Argument on the Existence of the Corporeal World

In Descartes’ Meditations On First Philosophy specifically the 6th Meditation’s 10th paragraph, Descartes goes through the process of, what he believes to be, proving the conclusion: That corporeal objects do exist. In this essay Descartes’ argument will be deconstructed into its premises, explaining those premises, reconstructing the argument, and lastly evaluation of the validity and soundness of his argument. Descartes begins his argument my stating his first premise, which is that he has the abilities of Imagination and Perception and that he can conceive of himself without these abilities, however he cannot conceive of these abilities without himself or some intellectual/mental substance; what Descartes means by this is that he has experience as a being of thought, or better put a thinking thing, as previously proven in the Cogito argument. Descartes then proceeds to state that these as he puts faculties, or better stated abilities, are the abilities of a thinking substance that cannot exist outside of the intellectual substance/thinking thing they are a part of. Following this, Descartes states as well that he has other abilities namely those of locomotion and body movement, in conjunction with this he says that these abilities are just like Imagination and Perception in that they cannot exist independently of the substance they are a part of; he writes that these abilities are apart of a substance that is corporeal/some extended substance. He says all of this because it serves as part of the foundation for the rest of his argument, as well as it coincides with his philosophy of Dualism as he earlier wrote of in the meditations about Mind-Body Dualism in which he stated that the Mind and Body are two separate substances. Descartes continues to say that it is impossible to doubt that he has a passive ability, for example Perception, that receives sensory information which he says is useless if there were not an active faculty, for example Imagination by