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The Cartesian Project
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The Cartesian Project
Cartesian doubt also called systematic doubt or universal doubt is a form of methodological skepticism related to the writings of Rene Descartes. It is a structured process of being doubtful about the reality of one’s belief. In western philosophy, he was extremely popular due to his method of doubt philosophy. He attempted to doubt the reality of his beliefs to deduce the certainty of these beliefs.
According to him, to be sure that something is true or certain it is important to abandon all the previous beliefs that we learn through our experience or taught by our parents and teachers. For this purpose, he developed a method known as the Cartesian method that consisted of four rules that are necessary to be certain about doubt or belief. These rules are:
Accept as true what is unquestionable.
Prejudices are the amount of information that has been conveyed to us. Although throughout our schooling we have learned a lot whether that can be considered as knowledge is a bit questionable. There are many things that people are compelled to believe as true or certain. This is a real threat as we are not gaining knowledge rather than just accepting the general perspective. According to Descartes, there is no such thing as probability and things are either true or false and genuine knowledge is what that is beyond any doubts based on facts.
Split every question or query into reasonable parts that are feasible.
Known things and unknown things are correlated. There is nothing in the world that is either unknown or fully known. To acquire knowledge or to explore the unknown it is mandatory to have all the data required that will help in searching for the truth. To find the truth the foremost important step is to consider what is unknown. Secondly, all the information about the unknown should be gathered so that one cannot deviate from the original goal that is to find the truth. Thirdly, it is important to figure out the relation between the unknown and the known.
Start with the uncomplicated issue (easy) towards the complicated issue (hard).
This rule is simply about differentiating the simple things from the complicated ones also, organizing them in such a way that the truth can be concluded.
Review periodically to grasp the whole argument immediately.
The search for the truth is not so simple. There are many questions that arise during the process. Some of them can be answered and the others cannot. The process is long and it is not possible to remember each and every detail. It is therefore important to focus on every detail as if any little detail goes missing the chain of searching the truth will be broken and the truth will escape from us (Goudriaan, 2016).
Descartes began his meditation I by starting from scratch by avoiding believing what he thinks is not certain. Basically, he questions the existence of everything. According to him, perception is just a belief which should not be considered the truth. He strongly believes that knowledge must be certain and unable to be doubted (Davies, 2017). Although many philosophers think that he raised the standards of knowledge too high. However, moving on towards meditation II he concluded that what is clear and distinct is true and is certain. In mediation III he questioned the existence of GOD by considering Him as an evil demon but later he realized that there an entity which is perfect and he lies between the perfect and imperfect means that he has a limited power to think and perceive. In mediation IV he discussed the possibility of an error that when a person exceeds the limit of understanding something he often makes the wrong decision. In mediation V he again focused on the existence of GOD and in meditation VI he argued over the relation between mind and body that some activities of our body are purely mechanical yet the mind controls body.
Descartes method as discussed earlier is more of a structured approach to assessing whether the beliefs on which we believe are actually true or not. He promoted to doubt the basic reasoning process as well as the evidence involved in that process. His project is also called as radical doubt because of his theory of knowledge which is rational. According to him, two objects are not identical if experience can prove that qualities of the objects being not similar to each other (Reynolds, 2019). He is very well known because of his dream issue. He illustrated a method of doubting every perception due to his lack of differentiating between vivid dreams from real-life incidents. Based on this he considers everything he sees in the world is just an imagination in fact the world itself is an imagination. Although other philosophers pointed out that it is possible to distinguish between a dream reality yet he still believes that dream and reality are indistinguishable and only greater rationality of perception can differentiate them. Another radical theory that he gave was about GOD. As he believed that God is an evil demon that is trying to deceive everyone and is the reason for all our experiences. Later in his meditation, he seems to have a conclusion that GOD is not an evil demon and therefore is not a deceiver. He also discovered that his existence is because he can think and if he is a thing that can think and can be deceived then he must also exist.
References
Davies, R. (2017). The Modes of Descartes’ First Meditation. In Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy (pp. 153-180). Springer, Cham.
Goudriaan, A. (2016). Descartes, Cartesianism, and Early Modern Theology. In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600-1800.
Reynolds, C. (2019). The Quest for Knowledge: A Study of Descartes.
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