Introduction, Mediation 1 and 2 | Meditation 3 | Meditation 4 | Meditation 5 | Meditation 6 |
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What is to find firm and constant (durable) knowledge in the sciences?
Descartes' purpose for the Meditations is this.
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What is clarity and distinctness?
This criteria allows Descartes to know with certainty.
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What is error?
This is a privation or a lack of some knowledge that I somehow should have.
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What is the certainty of material things?
Descartes wants to explore this in Meditation 5.
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What are material things?
These things are at least capable of existing because they are the object of pure mathematics.
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What are doubt of the senses, the dreamer's hypothesis and the evil genius?
Descartes Method of Doubt consists of these three steps.
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What are adventitious, fictitious, and innate?
These three things categorize ideas.
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What is will.
This is a single indivisible thing.
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What is existence?
God is said to be perfection and Descartes claims that this is a perfection.
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What is divisibility?
This is the main difference between a mind which is unified and a body which is composed.
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What are "I am, I exist" (cogito) and I exist as a thinking thing?
These are Descartes first two certitudes.
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What is the Deceiving God Hypothesis (evil genius)?
This motivates Descartes to prove God exists.
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What is the extension of the will beyond the understanding?
This is the source of error.
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What is the Ontological Argument?
The argument for God's existence in Meditation 5 is a rework of this old argument.
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What is the imagination?
This is a certain application of the cognitive faculty to a body.
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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
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What are ideas, emotion/volition, and judgement?
These three things are forms of thought.
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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.
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What is quantity?
The extension of a thing in length, breadth, and depth is an image of this.
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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.
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What is the wax example?
This example proves that sensation/perception is an activity of the mind.
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What is the correspondence theory of truth (representational realism)?
This theory suggests that things external to me send me their own likenesses and not something else.
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What is falsehood and fault?
Negation, non-entity and nothing are the ways Descartes describes this.
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What is a mountain is to a valley?
God's essence is to his existence as a ________ is to a __________.
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What is essential to my nature?
Because imagining is not this, it follows that it is dependent on things external to me.
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