Introduction, Mediation 1 and 2 | Meditation 3 | Meditations 4 & 5 | Meditation 6 | Miscellaneous |
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What is the lunatic hypothesis?
This first hypothesis was replaced by the Dreamer's hypothesis.
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What is an idea?
In its strict sense, this is an image of things.
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What is the way to avoid error?
Refraining from making a judgement about things that are obscure and confused is this.
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What is sensory experience?
The existence of bodies is hypothesized by Descartes because this thing is not necessary to the pure understanding.
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What is Res Cogitons or Thinking thing?
A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, does not will, and which also imagines and senses. (Latin and English)
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What is the evil genius?
This hypothesis balances the scales to keep Descartes from slipping back into his old thinking habits.
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What is the causal principle?
This principle is used to prove God's existence.
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What is the truth rule?
Following this means Descartes must separate the things he understands perfectly from those he understands in an obscure and confused way.
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What is sensation?
Descartes argues from this kind of thinking that physical things exist.
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What is in judgements?
This is the only place that falsity can reside.
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What is certitude?
This thing is the criterion that will be Descartes' Archimedian point.
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What is the natural light or reason?
This thing shows me that because I doubt, I exist and suchlike.
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What is a horse with or without wings?
I am not free to think of God without existence in the same way that I can imagine this.
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What are imagining and sensing?
These two faculties cannot be understood without myself as the intellectual substance in which they inhere because they are like modes of understanding.
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What is intentional/objective reality?
This term refers to the metaphysical position of ideas as they relate to one another substantively.
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What is the wax example?
This example demonstrates that the mind is known better than the body.
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What is formal reality?
.All ideas have this equalizing nature which is analogous to paint and canvas.
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What is God?
If I wasn't distracted by prejudice and images of things, I would know this prior to everything else.
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What is like a pilot to a ship or a ghost in a machine?
I am connected to my body in such an intimate way as to be unified with it. My relationship to my body is not like this.
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What is sensory perception?
These were given by nature to signify to the mind that which is beneficial or harmful for the body, but if I mistake them as guarantees of the essences of things, I run into problems.
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What is the defective design hypothesis?
This is the hypothesis in which Descartes suggests that it may be possible that God causes him to be mistaken, not unlike a faulty calculator.
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What is the Cartesian circle?
This problem keeps going round in Descartes' Meditations
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What is that clearly and distinctly perceived things are true?
If God exists and I understand that everything depends on Him and He is not a deceiver, I can conclude this.
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What is nature?
Descartes understands this to be God himself or a coordinated system of created things established by God.
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What are the understanding and the imagination?
When the mind turns inward it employs this, but when it turns outward, it uses this.
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