Rene Descartes And Starting “From Zero”

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• Descartes’ genius traits included intellectual honesty, curiosity, diverse interests, and non-conventional thinking.

• French-born Rene Descartes is widely considered the father of Western philosophy, and greatly advanced many metaphysical concepts still in use today.

• Descartes genius was to start, like Socrates, from a point of complete ignorance, i.e. to begin in absolute doubt and work his way to true knowledge one step at a time, using rational and logical thought.

• In 1641 he published his Meditations on First Philosophy, the first three meditations of which are designed as exercises to help a person use the “method of doubt” to discard false beliefs (meditation 1), find those beliefs that could not possibly be false (meditation 2) and devise some rock-solid criteria for what constitutes true knowledge (meditation 3).

• This approach is essentially an early form of the scientific method, as it outlines a path to true knowledge by removing everything that can be doubted and focusing on that which cannot logically be false, and therefore must be true. It’s via this path that Descartes believed he built a sound philosophy.

• In the first meditation, we use hypothetical doubt to tease out truth from the inaccuracies of our own perceptions, as well as the flaws and limits of our reasoning faculties. We can practice this sentiment by reminding ourselves that we can always be wrong, and to take doubt as a starting point, rather than to make assumptions.

• Meditation 2 is about finding out what is true once all that is false is removed from the equation. This is where Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum proposition comes about, explaining that at the very least, he knew he was in fact thinking, and that proved he existed.

• From this we are led to meditation 3, which discusses the criteria for universal knowledge as those things perceived clearly and distinctly.

• To take inspiration from Descartes, we needn’t follow his complex philosophy in detail, but we can practice a kind of philosophical doubt, committing never to hold beliefs we know aren’t true, and to have stringent standards for what we consider truth.

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