Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Introduction: About the Meditations
- 1 The situation of the Meditator is described and his desire to demolish everything and begin again is explored, while the Reader is introduced to some basic philosophical concepts
- 2 Meditation One : The possibility of a malevolent Demon is raised and the Meditator resolves to doubt everything he can possibly doubt
- 3 Meditation Two : The Meditator discovers an indubitable proposition and continues with an investigation into her ideas of herself and her ideas of corporeal things
- 4 Meditation Three (I) : The Meditator discovers how to distinguish true from false propositions by reference to the clarity and distinctness of his ideas and considers whether God is merely a subjective idea
- 5 Meditation Three (II) : The Meditator finds that he can reach a perfect God in his thoughts and that this God cannot perpetrate fraud and deception and cannot be a Demon
- 6 Meditation Four (I) : The Meditator broods on her epistemological and moral errors and deficiencies and discovers the true power of her will and its spontaneous attraction to truth and goodness
- 7 Meditation Four (II) : The Meditator diagnoses the cause of her epistemological and moral errors, adds an error-prevention rule to her knowledge-set, and confirms that God is truly benevolent
- 8 Meditation Five : The Meditator reflects on his experiences of mathematical and abstract concepts and arrives at a proof of God's existence
- 9 Meditation Six (I) : The Meditator determines that he is apparently attached to a particular human body. His mind and this putative body are nevertheless distinct and separable, so that immortality is possible even if bodies in general are perishable
- 10 Meditation Six (II) : The Meditator establishes that extramental corporeal things definitely exist, confirms that she has a personal body to which she is united, and learns that neither her sensations nor her perceptions resemble their causes in the external world
- 11 Meditation Six (III) : The Meditator learns how her body is organized, and discovers why her illnesses, like her errors, suggest that God is benevolent, and determines that she can proceed confidently in all the sciences
- 12 Descartes in context
- Appendix: the Objectors
- Glossary
- Further reading
- Index
4 - Meditation Three (I) : The Meditator discovers how to distinguish true from false propositions by reference to the clarity and distinctness of his ideas and considers whether God is merely a subjective idea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Introduction: About the Meditations
- 1 The situation of the Meditator is described and his desire to demolish everything and begin again is explored, while the Reader is introduced to some basic philosophical concepts
- 2 Meditation One : The possibility of a malevolent Demon is raised and the Meditator resolves to doubt everything he can possibly doubt
- 3 Meditation Two : The Meditator discovers an indubitable proposition and continues with an investigation into her ideas of herself and her ideas of corporeal things
- 4 Meditation Three (I) : The Meditator discovers how to distinguish true from false propositions by reference to the clarity and distinctness of his ideas and considers whether God is merely a subjective idea
- 5 Meditation Three (II) : The Meditator finds that he can reach a perfect God in his thoughts and that this God cannot perpetrate fraud and deception and cannot be a Demon
- 6 Meditation Four (I) : The Meditator broods on her epistemological and moral errors and deficiencies and discovers the true power of her will and its spontaneous attraction to truth and goodness
- 7 Meditation Four (II) : The Meditator diagnoses the cause of her epistemological and moral errors, adds an error-prevention rule to her knowledge-set, and confirms that God is truly benevolent
- 8 Meditation Five : The Meditator reflects on his experiences of mathematical and abstract concepts and arrives at a proof of God's existence
- 9 Meditation Six (I) : The Meditator determines that he is apparently attached to a particular human body. His mind and this putative body are nevertheless distinct and separable, so that immortality is possible even if bodies in general are perishable
- 10 Meditation Six (II) : The Meditator establishes that extramental corporeal things definitely exist, confirms that she has a personal body to which she is united, and learns that neither her sensations nor her perceptions resemble their causes in the external world
- 11 Meditation Six (III) : The Meditator learns how her body is organized, and discovers why her illnesses, like her errors, suggest that God is benevolent, and determines that she can proceed confidently in all the sciences
- 12 Descartes in context
- Appendix: the Objectors
- Glossary
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
CLEAR AND DISTINCT PERCEPTION – TRUTH (AT VII:34–6)
I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I will regard all such images as vacuous, false and worthless. I will converse with myself and scrutinize myself a little more deeply; and in this way I will attempt to achieve, little by little, a more intimate knowledge of myself.
(vii:34)The Meditator continues with his experiment in Hyperbolic Doubt, maintaining the fiction of the malevolent Demon. When we left him at the end of Meditation Two, his belief-set was as it is represented in Figure 16. The Meditator reasons that he can add a new, significant item to his belief-set. He now “knows what is required for being certain of anything.” He is in a position, he finds, to lay down a general rule that will serve as the sought-for filter that can separate true from false. The filter is the test or criterion of the clarity and distinctness of his perceptions. Justifying, or certifying, this filter as “performing as advertised” takes up, as one might expect, the entirety of Meditation Three.
I am certain that I am a thinking thing … In this first item of knowledge there is simply a clear and distinct perception of what I am asserting; this would not be enough to make me certain of the truth of the matter if it could ever turn out that something which I perceived with such clarity and distinctness was false.[…]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Descartes's MeditationsAn Introduction, pp. 78 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003