Monday, February 18, 2008
Meditations, Part 1, Paragraph 8
In Meditations, Part 1, Paragraph 8, Descartes says now it is hard to doubt that you have a body. He says there are many things that are easy to doubt. Things like, physics, astronomy, medicine are doubtful because they are dependent on other things that must be true. You must form a hypothesis for those concepts. You must test out the hyposthesis. Those hypothesis' are considered to be true until they are proven false. So, who knows, things that we may think are true have the possibility to be determined as false. Things that you can not doubt are things like arithmetic and geometry. They have set quantities. D says that like in arithmetic 2+3=5. We know this and we do not doubt it because it is understood that 2 is 2 and 3 is 3 and when you put 2 and 3 together, it makes 5. Things that have a set meaning can not be doubted. Language is also undoubted I feel. Everyone understands that the word, table, means a structure that you can eat dinner on. Also, everyone understands that the word, chair, means a structure that you sit on.
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4 comments:
you bring up some good points. i also think that descartes was getting at the you can't be sure of anything, which seems to be a theme throughout the parts.
Think about how doubtful medicine can be...veryy interesting. Perhaps there is no medicine, perhaps medicine is something imagined and made up, perhaps its all a scam to make money. I mean a bottle of tylenol is what like seven dollars? That's ridiculous...But who is to say certain medicines are to do certain things, and are to really work? What if all medicines were just identical to eachother, but yett the factory makers make you think differently?...Medicine is all in the mind, the pills are all placebos of different shapes and sizesss...hmm.
I agree completely with Descartes in that we do not doubt what we have come to learn. For example, what he says about mathematics and language. We doubt things like physics, astronomy, and medicine because mistakes are made. We need those things that set meaning inorder for us to live. Can you imagine how disorganized and chaotic the world would be if we did not have structure like mathematics, language, time, etc.?
yeah if we did not have math, time and ideas of physics life would be slightly chaotic, i agree.
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