Introduction, Mediation 1 and 2 | Meditation 3 | Meditation 4 | Meditation 5 | Meditation 6 |
---|---|---|---|---|
What is to find firm and constant (durable) knowledge in the sciences?
Descartes' purpose for the Meditations is this.
|
What is clarity and distinctness?
This criteria allows Descartes to know with certainty.
|
What is error?
This is a privation or a lack of some knowledge that I somehow should have.
|
What is the certainty of material things?
Descartes wants to explore this in Meditation 5.
|
What are material things?
These things are at least capable of existing because they are the object of pure mathematics.
|
What is skepticism?
This is the thesis that it is impossible to know anything.
|
What are adventitious, fictitious, and innate?
These three things categorize ideas.
|
What is will.
This is a single indivisible thing.
|
What is existence?
God is said to be perfection and Descartes claims that this is a perfection.
|
What is divisibility?
This is the main difference between a mind with is unified and a body which is composed.
|
What is Res extensa or body.
Anything that can be limited by some shape, can be circumscribed in a place and can fill a space to the exclusion of others from it. (Latin and English required)
|
What is the Deceiving God Hypothesis (evil genius)?
This motivates Descartes to prove God exists.
|
What is the extension of the will beyond the understanding?
This is the source of error.
|
What is the Ontological Argument?
The argument for God's existence in Meditation 5 is a rework of this old argument.
|
What is the imagination?
This is a certain application of the cognitive faculty to a body.
|
What is the tree metaphor?
This metaphor is often used to explain the importance of metaphysics.
|
What are emotion, volition, and judgement?
These three things are forms of thought.
|
What is judgement?
Although an inexact interpretation of Descartes, this can be said to be the result of the intellect and the will's marriage.
|
What is quantity?
The extension of a thing in length, breadth, and depth is an image of this.
|
What are geometrical figures like triangles, pentagons, myriagons and chiliagons?
These examples are used by Descartes to demonstrate the difference between imagination and the understanding.
|
What is thinking?
Having a sensation is none other than this.
|
What is the correspondence theory of truth?
This theory suggests that things external to me send me their own likenesses and not something else.
|
What is falsehood and fault?
Negation, non-entity and nothing are the ways Descartes describes this.
|
What is a mountain is to a valley?
God's essence is to his existence as a ________ is to a __________.
|
What is essential to my nature?
Because imagining is not this, it follows that it is dependent on things external to me.
|