Descartes, Epictetus, And Plato

Descartes has written a set of six meditations on the first philosophy. In these meditations he analyzes his beliefs and questions where those beliefs were derived from. The first mediation of Descartes discusses his skeptical hypotheses; questioning the validity of the influences of his knowledge. He has a few main goals that are expressed through the first meditation. First off, Descartes wants to build a firm foundation of knowledge that is also concrete. Through probing his mind for answers to all of his skeptical thoughts, he hopes to eliminate the skepticism and find true, unquestionable knowledge. Descartes has mapped out ways to

Through the works of Epicurus, Epictetus, and Aquinas, it is evident that their philosophies inherit a great deal of virtue. Although roughly specified, virtue is implanted within their different ideologies. From achieving happiness, stoic beliefs, and in respects to Christian idealism, virtue turns out to be the driving factor in determining the ideal meaning of life from the perspective of each philosopher and it gives them their value. Backed by firm evidence, it is notable that virtue is more apparent in the Thomism philosophy.

René Descartes believed that all truth could be found by rationalization, that it is not that any one person lacks the ability to come to the conclusion of truth, but that we all think differently and do not analyze situations in the same way. To understand his strategy, you must first understand the type of life that Descartes lived. Descartes was always a very intelligent person with a passion for learning. He spent much time studying in school in order to learn about truth and the world, but what he found was that he had not actually found

Rene Descartes, a rationalist, said that each person contains the criteria for truth and knowledge in them. Finding truth and knowledge comes from the individual themselves, not necessarily from God. Descartes also believed that reason is the same for every single person. Descartes believed that nothing could be true unless we as humans could perceive it. He also believed that you could break down things into smaller simpler parts. Descartes also believed that there was a relationship between the mind and body. He also believed that the idea of being perfect originated from God since God himself was perfect. He also integrates his mathematical concepts into his methodology. Descartes also applied doubt to his ideas before he

The mythical phoenix is born in the ashes of its mother once she has been consumed in flame, becoming stronger than she ever was. In Discourse on Method, Descartes hopes to destroy the conventional understanding of philosophy that has been followed throughout the ages, and in doing so establish his own philosophy as the new convention in the ashes of the old philosophy. In this paper, I will present Descartes’ findings of instability in philosophy and distaste for the way people learn as his motivation for undertaking this reconstruction of his thoughts, finding a firm and lasting basis for the sciences as his end goal for the reconstruction, and his rules for conducting thought and code of doubt as the way by which he hopes to achieve

Rene Descartes decision to shatter the molds of traditional thinking is still talked about today. He is regarded as an influential abstract thinker; and some of his main ideas are still talked about by philosophers all over the world. While he wrote the "Meditations", he secluded himself from the outside world for a length of time, basically tore up his conventional thinking; and tried to come to some conclusion as to what was actually true and existing. In order to show that the sciences rest on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the senses, Descartes must begin by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to him by the senses. This is done in the first of six

In Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method he expresses his disappointment with traditional philosophy and with the limitations of theology; only logic, geometry and algebra hold his respect, because of the utter certainty which they can offer us. Unfortunately, because they depend on hypotheses, they cannot tell us what is real, i.e. what the world is really like. Therefore Descartes suggests a method of thought combining the consistency of mathematics but based on natural truths about what is real, basic knowledge which could not be wrong (like the axioms of geometry). He calls into question everything that he thinks he has learned through his senses but rests his entire system on the one truth that he cannot doubt, namely, the reality of his own mind and the radical difference between the mental and the physical aspects of the world.

These attitudes from Descartes are nearly identical to the thoughts and philosophies of ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, of whom I also have difficulty relating to my own personal experience and worldview. Plato held the belief that universe, which he also understood as illusory, was brimming with of ideas containing ideal forms of literally everything in existence. In his concept of “Ideal Forms” Plato conveyed the idea that each living person was born with what he believed was essentially a library of images in our minds. He imagined that the universe, in which we live, contained imperfect copies of these

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes strives first and foremost to provide an infallibly justified foundation for the empirical sciences, and second to prove the existence of God. I will focus on the first and second meditations in my attempt to show that, in his skepticism of the sources of knowledge, he fails to follow the rules he has set out in the Discourse on Method. First I claim that Descartes fails to draw the distinction between pure sensation and inference, which make up what he calls sensation, and then consider the consequences of this failure to follow his method. Second, I will show that in his treatment of thinking Descartes fails to distinguish between active and passive thinking.

In the beginning of the book, we learn about Descartes’ realization that method he used to learn mathematics and science at university was essentially impractical. In Descartes’ own words, “As regards the analysis of the ancients or the algebra of the moderns… they apply only to very abstract questions which seem to have no use.” (Descartes 15) So this tells the reader that Descartes is transitioning his reasoning from purely scientific proof to an approach that provides a more holistic proof.

The philosophical thought is that the mind and body are two separate things; with one being able to exist without the other has caused much discussion and debate among philosophers and theologians over the years. René Descartes and Plato, two well-known philosophers, argue that people have a mind or soul, which is somehow connected with the body, but the mind or soul can exist independently from our body. Descartes introduces the mind-body argument while Plato presents the soul-body argument. Although the arguments differ in some ways, Descartes and Plato also have similar opinions on the issue. As a person of faith, there is some difficulty in explaining to a non-believer that when a person dies, the soul does not perish with the body. While siding with Descartes and his belief in a perfect God, this essay seeks to review the issues of dualism and meditation, through the eyes of Descartes and Plato.

His work was mostly dealt with human knowledge through natural sciences. The Cartesian method he came up with was characterized by four precepts. The first precept is if there is any doubt, don’t accept it as true. The second precept is, divide and conquer ideas or beliefs if uncertain about anything and break it down into parts. Third precepts consist of examining beliefs step by step and for the fourth precept; you review all beliefs for clarity and consider all counterexamples. Descartes had questioned all of his beliefs and doubts and only believed if there was no doubt in anything.

Descartes is a rationalist about knowledge, so that means he believes that it is possible to gain knowledge through our mind and that we have the ability to know things that we have never seen or experienced before.(Descartes, 1641) He believes that everyone is born with the inherent ability to know two things; mathematics and God. He argues that we have the ability to infer mathematic skills from our minds. (Pismenny, 2016) He also says that we are born with the idea of God and religion already in our minds and that God is responsible for

René Descartes is a seminal figure to the new-world view of the 'high ' enlightenment. Within the new world-view that expressed logical ideas grounded upon hypothesis and experiment by reducing scientific phenomena to a mathematical formulae, Descartes ' regarded this method highly as he valued mathematics eminently when writing of his own approach to the method. He quotes; “...I enjoyed mathematics, because of the certainty and self-evidence of its

One cannot work without the other. If Descartes inner circle grew faster than the outside circle – all of the society on the outside would be effected by the intellectual radical changes in the fields of math, philosophy or even psychology, the outer circle or naturalistic society would certainly punish him or shun his theories as fast as the words came out. Descartes personal life played a dramatic and drastic role simultaneously, he lived a very secret and dark world within himself, he was not in strong health and preferred to sleep late in the morning, and while having these attributes which he kept all his life, the gift of his creative thinking (mind) impacted his thought process the rest of his days. Descartes life was that of pure and simple pleasures. He had lost the love of life, his daughter Francine at the age of 5, which caused him to be inconsolable and would have a profound toll on his mind and body. He became a recluse by moving so many times to have a strong desire for