Descartes Meditations On First Philosophy: An Analysis

With the human mind, body, and soul combined it is easy to be fooled into seeing and believing things that aren’t really there. We may easily see truths that are lies, and we may see lies that as truths. The world can look like everything is true at times, and other times like everything is just the opposite. There is nothing in this world a person can be too sure about, or it will turn around and deceive you. There are many road blocks and manipulations in life to question the real authenticy of not only what is right in front of you, as well as yourself and your very own thoughts. This paper will explore the depths of Descartes argument over deception and the truth that is certain in the human mind and body, along with the existence of a perfect being and of an evil genius. In Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, he doubts everything he possibly knows to be true in this world. We rely entirely on our senses to perceive the world, therefore we believe them fully. But to Descartes our senses cannot be trusted entirely, he explains that our senses have been known to deceive us constantly if we take a step back and recognize it. First, to explain this he calls into doubt
Once the truths are no longer paid attention to, they are able to be filled back with doubt making him skeptical if the evil genius made him accredit these ‘truths’ in the first place. His next venture was to find the existence of a perfect God so these truths will constantly be protected without doubt. In this theory Descartes describes that the God must be perfect if He exists, and if this is so He must exist because it is more perfect to be existing than to not be existing at all. Descartes goes on to explain that because we have an idea of God in our mind’s thoughts, we therefore cannot be the creator of ourselves or else we would have been made perfectly in the first