René Descartes

=== Descartes was a French Philosopher and mathematician. He Decided to quit school and went on a journey around the world. With his journey he tried to find out the answer on 2 questions, “Does god exist?” and “Does our soul exist?”

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“The perfection of god”

“Existence is derived immediately from the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being. “ With this argument he tries to explain that perfection doesn’t exist. Nothing in the world is perfect, except the “god” thing where people believe in. He also is sure about his knowledge about god and perfection but he doesn’t know how we got the knowledge about him. He has several reasons to doubt this.

·        * Knowledge gathered by senses can’t be reliable

·        * Our observations can be hallucinations

·        * We can never be sure if we’re dreaming or not

·        * The whole world could be an illusion created by an evil spirit

All his research in severel parts of the world made him doubt in the existence of the material world. He isn’t even sure about the existence of god and himself. He has thrown himself in a vortex of questions.

He discovered that, although he can doubt almost everything, he can’t doubt the fact he doubts, and therefore there must be something that doubt. Although he still doubts the existence of the world around him, Descartes is now sure that he himself, the source of the doubt exists.

= The beginning of his philosophy = Descartes has thus found the foundation of his philosophy. With this in his mind he starts to doubt everything around him. Descartes then wondered what it is that we perceive when we see objects. The properties we assign to the objects like color , shape, taste and smell are variable and are possible to be illusions also caused by “the evil spirit”. What is certain, however, according to Descartes, is that objects have a property. He kept searching and thinking about this and made a second statement.

What about God?

In this meditation, Descartes delivers his first Proof of God One of the reasons that Descartes wants to prove the existence of God is because this would be a way to pitch into the evil spirit. Descartes identifies his mind and comes to the conclusion that he can’t deny that there is a perfect being. Descartes now assumes that God exists and that he is not an impostor. He also asks the question how it is that a perfect God create a being that can make so many mistakes like humans. Descartes explains the fact that we make mistakes because God gives us a finite intellect, but has given us an infinite wants. Mistakes and sins are caused by abusing man's free will.

According to Descartes, the only certainty we can have about material objects are mathematically