Descartes' First Meditation Quiz

Descartes' First Meditation: Doubting the Foundations of Belief

• Descartes feels the need to demolish his beliefs and start anew in order to establish stable and lasting scientific foundations.
• He sets aside a clear stretch of time to sincerely and without holding back demolish his opinions.
• To reject all his opinions, he seeks to find in each of them at least some reason for doubt.
• He decides to go straight for the basic principles on which all his former beliefs rested.
• He realizes that whatever he accepted until now as most true has come to him through his senses, but the senses can sometimes deceive us.
• However, he believes that beliefs like "I am here, sitting by the fire" are impossible to doubt because they come directly from the senses.
• He argues against doubting that his hands or his whole body are his, as that would liken him to brain-damaged madmen.
• He then questions whether he is dreaming and realizes that there is never any reliable way of distinguishing being awake from being asleep.
• He considers that even if he is dreaming, the visions that come in sleep must be made as copies of real things.
• He concludes that certain simpler and more universal kinds of things, such as body, extension, shape of extended things, quantity, size, number, places, and time, must be real.
• These simpler and more universal kinds of things are the elements out of which we make all our mental images of things, both true and false.
• Descartes' first meditation is focused on doubting the foundations of belief in order to establish a new and stable scientific foundation.