Rene Descartes Discourse On Method And Meditations On First Philosophy

I. Introduction
Rene Descartes was born in Lay Haye, France on March 31, 1596. He was a prized mathematician and philosopher (Cress, vii). Descartes published many works on philosophy, one of his most famous being Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. This book discusses the nature of human knowledge. He does this by first differentiating skepticism from doubt, then he goes through the different steps of doubt, and concludes with the idea of the cogito. His philosophy on the nature of human knowledge emphasizes how there is only one thing that people know for certain, and that knowledge comes from people thinking. One of Descartes biggest critics was David Hume. Hume grew up in Edinburgh and, like Descartes, was regarded
For Descartes, anything that people understand with certainty is real (De Rosa, 14). That idea leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Descartes values “objectivity of ideas”, but it seems that when a person thinks about those ideas they are thinking about them subjectively (De Rosa, 14). People do not know whether or not Descartes is referring only to the idea of thinking or whether he is referring to the way in which people think as being objective. For example, people can look at the moon and understand that it is real and exists. The moon exists in people’s thoughts but the real moon itself does not exist in people’s minds, only the idea of it which is
Ironically, Descartes philosophy on human knowledge came to him through dreams. He had three dreams, the first one in which he was in a courtyard “where he received a pomegranate” from someone that seemed to know him (Pagel, 45). His second dream was about “a sharp notice, which he interpreted as thunder”, and his final dream “featured an anthology and diction”, which he interpreted to signify philosophy and wisdom (Pagel, 45). Descartes claimed that there was significance in dreams and allowed his dreams to determine his own path in life and encouraged people to listen to their dreams. In the book Dream Science: Exploring the Forms of Consciousness it is mentioned that a scientific method was able to be formed from Descartes philosophy regarding dreams (Pagel, 45). The steps of this method were “don’t accept anything to be true that is not known to be true”, break down problems into “multiple parts”, start from what you understand, “and keep records” (Pagel, 45- 46). This method requires people to take the content of their dreams seriously and to document what they dream. By documenting their dreams, people will have something to reference back to and will be able to better understand their dreams. Descartes emphasis on dreams shows how he felt that dreams had the ability to reveal actual truth to people, if they took the proper steps to understand