Immune Of Doubt By Rene Descartes - 916 Words

Immune to doubt In his meditation writing, Rene Descartes tries to find that one thing that is absolutely certain and therefore is immune to doubt. The way in which he attempts to do this is by doubting everything that he knows to be true until the mere action of doubting that thing becomes a contradiction in itself. Since it is unrealistic, and maybe logistically impossible, to doubt every single thing that he holds to be true in this world, Descartes starts by rejecting everything that he would consider to be fundamental and he declares, in his writhing, that everything is unreal because doing this knocks down the foundation of his knowledge. The foundation of his knowledge, for all he knows, might be true but since he has not proven it to be true yet, it would be easier to start in a clean slate and build undoubtable knowledge from scratch. Descartes eventually comes to the conclusion that the one thing that is immune to doubt is that he is a thinking thing. In making this assertion, Descartes ha d to establish that he exists and subsequently make several enquiries about his attributes and be able to demonstrate that he can only be sure of his ability to think. In the process of questioning his own existence Descartes starts by denying the existence of his body and his senses, perhaps the two most important things that we humans associate with our being. He biases these denials on the fact that he had dreams before that had seemed just as vivid as ‘real life’ perhaps heShow MoreRelatedRene Descartes And Skepticism Argument763 Words   |  4 PagesEssay 1 Skepticism, in general, is the theory that knowledge is impossible without certainty. Rene Descartes aimed to prove skepticism wrong by using his method of hyperbolic doubt, which stated that you should only believe certain things that are immune from doubt and throw out anything that may be doubted. 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