Descartes The Evil Spirit Argument

First Evaluative Paper
Samuel Rogers
Intro to Philosophy 100 In this paper, I will explain and evaluate Descartes doubts that he raises on both about the external world as well as these disciplines on the basis of the Evil Spirt Argument. The first thing that I am going to do is to explain what Descartes’s project of the Meditations and the role of the method of doubt in that project. Then I will explain the Evil Spirit Argument in depth about each of the premises. Once I explain the argument I will then go onto evaluate all of the premises. Finally, I will end with a conclusion on how my evaluation of the argument bears on Descartes’s project, and whether or not Descartes succeeded in using the method of doubt to accomplish his aims. Descartes’s
The first premise is Descartes brings into this argument is that he can only know something about the external world, arithmetic, and geometry only if he can know that there is not an evil spirit deceiving him (Meditations, pg. 15-16). In other words, Descartes is trying to get at the fact that this so to say God is giving him false perception of the external world, and deceiving him in what he thought he knew was certain. Descartes conception of knowledge is broken into different parts one being truths that can only be known by reason alone, also those that are not known by reason alone, and the other is the empirical part in the natural sciences (Ludwig, 2017). What is meant by the natural sciences are those of arithmetic, geometry, and others of this nature (Meditations, pg. 15). For these they were simple and general things, and contained things that were certain and indubitable (Meditations, pg. 15). The second premise is that Descartes has no way of knowing if he is being deceived by an evil demon (Mediations, pg. 16-17). Descartes is pretty straight forward on this one and that is that there is no possible way for him to know whether or not he is in fact is being feed false information about everything. With this idea in mind, Descartes’s conception of knowledge would not allow him to know anything at all because of the idea that he has been feed false information his entire life. The conclusion that Descartes comes to was
When you start to think about the fact that I can know something about the external world, arithmetic, and geometry only if I can know that I am not being deceived by an evil spirit you start to wonder where what we know comes from and how we know what we know is true because we were told that it was true from the beginning. So, one reason for doubting premise number one would be that we as individuals have been given no reason to think that we are being deceived. This holds up for our knowledge of our external world, as well as applying to mathematical knowledge. A second reason for doubting premise one would be that we have lived our entire lives out till the present day. We would not know if we are being deceived or not and it does not matter if we are or not simply because we have lived without knowing up to present day. The reasons for and against accepting premise one are great to me, but I would say that reasons for premise one triumph those of those going against it. My reasoning behind agreeing with premise one is that we cannot know something if in fact we are being deceived by an evil