Wiping The Slate CleanDescartes Essays - Belief, Thought

Wiping The Slate Clean:Descartes One of Descartes earliest arguments discusses the law of non-contradiction. In his reasoning, everyone has the same amount of good sense and access to the truth when they are born into this world, yet people obviously disagree on many issues. The reason for this fact is that people do not follow the same line of reasoning because they do not take the same things into consideration as a result of different life experiences. In Descartes law of non-contradiction there is only one truth for every question, so when two people disagree on something, one of them has to be right. A good example of this would be if there were two people. One thinks red is the best color and the other person believes blue is the best color. For Descartes, one or both of these people must be wrong because there is only one truth. His task is to look at this situation and locate who holds the truth. If certain guidelines could be established by which everyone could come to conclusions, it would be possible to o btain this truth, and we would no longer have diversity in opinions. Descartes makes this point in reference to Philosophy when he says, ?seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute To him, this means that a primary goal of philosophy, finding truth, has not been achieved. He sets forth to change that by implementing a new method of philosophy. He gathered from this that if everyone disagrees, everything that people believe must be unsure, and therefore a poor basis for truth seeking. He comes to this realization when he says, ?I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false.? Descartes new method promoted that, to find truth, you must purge everything based upon anything unsure. Descartes wants to strip himself of all beliefs, including everything he has learned and sensed. Our senses sometimes deceive us, and it only makes sense to choose never to trust in something that has failed us in the past. book learning, at least the kind whose reasonings are merely probable and that do not have any demonstrations, having been composed and enlarged little by little from the opinions of many different persons, does not draw nearly so close to the truth as the simple reasoning that a man of good sense can naturally make about the things he encounters.? He believed knowledge gained from sensation or from books is not clearly true, Descartes needed to find a way to develop a new belief system. He described this new method in four rules, which if obeyed, would constitute a satisfactory belief system and eliminate all disagreement. The first rule states that one should only accept as true what he sees clearly and distinctly as true. Nothing with any possibility of falsity can be included. This brings up an interesting point. Is there anything that is so absolutely true? It would be very difficult to have something be thought of as true to everyone, but that is the job Descartes imposed upon himself. The second rule says it is necessary to break down all problems into as many pieces as possible so it is easier to solve them clearly. The third rule states he will start with the simplest and easiest way to understand objects and move up to more complex issues. The fourth and final rule states that he must periodically check his work, making sure that there is no possibility that he could exclude anything. This is the method by which he plans to establish indisputable truth. Though he proposes we wipe the slate clean, Descartes claims that he is not a skeptic because skepticism ends in doubt while his goal is to firmly establish truth. Descartes is a methodical doubter who uses doubt as a tool to establish truth, so he does not simply propose that we abandon out beliefs without a plan. His four rules are the method by which he proposes to rebuild our beliefs. He argues that if you are going to throw away