Descartes searched for a
method that would enable knowledge to be certain. He looked at the sciences,
especially mathematics to based this method. Descartes begins by doubting
everything. He asserts, “And thus I realized that once I raze everything to the
ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish
anything firm and last in the sciences.”[1]
He began by doubting everything as a methodology to achieve certainty except
for the validity of such a method of doubting everything. This was different
from philosophers who preceded him whom accepted common beliefs until they were
shown to be unreliable.
Descartes thought the senses could not be trusted. They
did not give a certain knowledge, but only a probable knowledge. So, his method
would need to be deductive. He concluded that he needed to doubt everything
that could be doubted and rebuild only the beliefs that had “valid and
considered reasons.”[2]
In other words, beliefs must have evidence to support them. He decided that he
would put “aside everything that admits of the least doubt. . . I will stay on
this course until I know something certain.”[3]
He discovered that thought alone was certain.
He also had great confidence in his “natural light”, that is, his
natural capacity to think clearly and logically. He thought he could not
separate thought from himself. Because he thought; he existed. From this
foundation, he would build his knowledge base. He thought of himself as
something that thinks. He was also a “thing that doubts, understands, affirms,
denies, wills, refuses, and also imagines and senses.”[4]
He is not his body; he is his mind. He restores our knowledge of the world of
extended things (that is, the world of everything beyond his mind, including
his body), but only as extended objects that can be known by way of
measurement.
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