Descartes’ Flawed Reasoning in His Meditations

Philosophy 310                                                                   Vlad Barash

Professor Kuehn

Descartes’ flawed reasoning in his Meditations

        Widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, in his work, Meditations on First Philosophy, famously attempts to formulate an argument for the existence of God, which I will argue to be false. In articulating a new foundation for knowledge, he begins by skeptically doubting that which he thought he knew by claiming everything open to the slightest doubt is false. Since it is possible for one to be dreaming and convinced they are sensing real objects, he argues that one can doubt the very foundation of knowledge. Spiraling further into a pit of doubt, he assumes that if an evil genius is somehow deceiving him, then it is true nothing is certain and everything can be called into doubt. Descartes rises from his skepticism in his Second Meditation where he concedes that his act of thinking and doubting assumes his existence. Even if there were an evil genius that was deceiving him, he believes that he must exist in order to be misled. He purports that what he does know for certain is that he exists as a thinking thing that “doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants, refuses, and also imagines and senses.”

        Descartes argues for the existence of god in a well-formed argument, within Meditation V, that served a purpose to thinkers of his time period, but to contemporary philosophers Descartes’ Ontological Argument is unescapably flawed. He explains that when he imagines a triangle there is an essence of the triangle that is eternal and independent from his mind. Even if he never saw any triangles or thought of them, when he does imagine one he is constrained in how he can have an idea of a triangle in his thoughts. God, he argues, forms a similar constriction due to the definition. To Descartes, God is a supremely perfect being, and this definition forms the basis of his argument. He says that the idea of a supremely perfect being is something that he finds within him the same way that he does with shapes and numbers. Therefore, in order to formulate his argument for the existence of God, he proceeds by proclaiming that the definition of God is a supremely perfect being, that a supremely perfect being is one that has all perfections imaginable, and that existence is more perfect than non-existence hence is one of these perfections that God has. From these premises, if one assumes they are all true, it does follow that God exists; however, taking apart these assumptions we can conclude that they are simply assumptions and biases that Descartes makes.