Rene Descartes Meditations On First Philosophy

While early Greek philosophers were contemplating on topics such the origin of change and the idea of a priori knowledge, Early Modern Philosophers took an interest about nature and how the power of science and mathematics comes into play. One early philosopher was Rene Descartes with his work Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes was once a foundationalist, believing that our knowledge originated in our senses. His positioned changed, however, when he began use his skepticism to test if our belief could be absolutely certain. His Dream Argument helped explained how mathematics are able to be true even if our senses could be fooled, though the Evil Demon Argument calls that to question. Descartes does placed mathematics as true, immutable, and innate as one cannot think of something like a triangle having a total interior angle of 180 degrees separately. On the nature of science, Descartes introduced the concept of substance in Cartesian Dualism, where the mind and body are distinct, yet still interact. While it shares the focus on the idea of substance, philosopher John Locke’s theory were quite different from Descartes.
Instead he believed that we are able learn through sensation and reflection. His contribution to early modern philosophy was his theory of substance. He believed that the things of the material world are comprised of primary and secondary qualities. The thing that makes them substance, however, isn’t just the qualities being together, but the unification of qualities brought together by the substratum. Issue arise with the concept of substratum though as it is something Locke admits is unknown and is not possible to visibly observe it. This unanswerable concept will also be shared by the ideas by the like of