General remarks

1. Why Meditationes de prima philosophia?  And why in Latin?

2. The 3 main goals of the Meditations:

1. Demonstrate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. (stated)
2. Provide a foundation for the sciences, especially the physical sciences. (stated)
3. Show that the new science and traditional non-revealed religion are not only compatible, but rest on the same right philosophy.

• the first person account.  How one should put oneself in the shoes of the narrator.
• parallel with Loyola's Spiritual Exercises: the intellectual conversion to Rationalism with its denial of any privileged role of sensation in knowledge.

 

• Solid foundation needed in the sciences and the search for an Archimedean unshakable point.

NOTE: Foundationalism vs e.g., Quine.
• The doubt and its role: why a critique of the foundations of knowledge and the methodological nature of the doubt.
• The levels of doubt:
1. doubt about the senses in their usual employment (square towers, bent  sticks, etc.)
2. doubt about the senses in apparently indubitable employment, e.g., I have a body; I'm sitting near the fire : the dream argument shows that even vivid sense-evidence can be doubted.

NOTE: this overthrows even highly mathematized empirical sciences e.g., astronomy.
3. doubts about evidence for a-priori sciences, e.g., maths:
• God might induce me to make mistakes

Objection: Perhaps there's no God
Reply: Then my capacity to err is still present because my origin would be imperfect.
• The evil demon, who takes over the deceiver role that only blasphemy could attribute to God.
• The insulation of doubt, i.e., its methodical nature.

Second Meditation
 
In the second Meditation, Descartes starts to emerge from the doubt by admitting only what he knows to be true and progressing from it by indubitable principles.

A.  The cogito

• 'I am, I exist' is true whenever I think. I think, therefore I am; I know I exist for as long as I think. If I stop thinking I might go out of existence.

NOTE: Why 'I walk, therefore I am' won't do.
Problems:
1. Starting point of cogito cannot be 'I think', but 'there are thoughts'.  But from this one cannot get the 'I' of 'I exist'.

Reply: role of unity of consciousness: the thoughts are held in one consciousness (synchronic identity of subject)
2. How can Descartes establish his diachronic identity, i.e., that  'I' is the subject of thoughts at different times? Since it takes time to think "I think therefore I am,"  couldn't the evil demon transfer memories from one subject to another?
• What am I? A thinking thing, i.e., a thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, unwilling, imagines, has sensory perception (in Descartes' technical sense: I seem to hear, see, etc.)
• Five claims ultimately included in "I am a thinking thing":

1. I think
2. I exist
3. Thought is essential to me.
4. Thought is the only property essential to me
5. I am essentially a thinking thing and essentially non-material.

NOTE: In Meditation II, Descartes accepts 1-3, leaving the remaining two for later.

1. the knowledge of my existence more certain than that of the wax
2. the wax is known through 'intellectual inspection', not through senses and imagination.

NOTES:
• the downplaying of sensation continues
• Descartes seems also to prepare the way for the claim that the essence of the wax, as a material thing, is to be found in extension
3. the mind better known than the wax because every mental operation which makes us know the wax makes us know the mind.

Problem: Descartes makes a good case for (1; 2). However, he fails to prove (3): the microscope example.

The Meditation has two goals:

1. to show that God exists
2. to show that God is not deceitful and hence can guarantee the veridicality of clear and distinct ideas (presumably when I don't scrutinize them and consequently don't perceive them now as clear and distinct).

• turning away from the senses (close eyes, shut ears, efface images)
• validating clear and distinct ideas. I know I'm a thinking thing, and I know I'm right because I perceive the cogito clearly and distinctly.  Hence, I conclude that clearness and distinctness are marks of truth.

NOTE: Descartes doesn't tell us what the criteria for clearness and distinctness are; however, the cogito seems to satisfy two: withstanding intense scrutiny, and being pragmatically indubitable.

• in terms of representation: ideas as modes of thought vs. ideas as representative entities, e.g., willing vs. idea of a chair.

Representative ideas, when not alleging the existence of what they represent,  cannot be false.
Modes of thought (with the exception of judgments) can never be 'false': if I desire what doesn't exist, it remains true that I desire it.
Judgments, by contrast, can be false.
NOTE: modes of thought entail representative ideas.  For example, willing needs an intentional object, and hence a representation of that object.
• in terms of origin: ideas seem to be:

• adventitious, through the senses (sounds, flowers)
• factitious, made up by us (sirens, hippogriff)
• innate (truth, thought, thing)

• the dream argument shows that ideas of external objects might not be produced by external objects
• the sensible and astronomical ideas of the sun cannot both  resemble the sun itself, and only the latter is true, as reason, not the senses, tells me.

NOTES:
Continuation of the critique of the senses
Critique of the Scholastic theory of sensation with its intentional species.

• Some scholastic terminology:

if an idea A represents a thing X which has property F, then F is in A objectively and in X subjectively (as in a subject).  F can be in  X formally or eminently, i.e., in a higher form.  For example, if A is an idea of a hard stone X, then hardness is objectively in A, subjectively and formally in X, and eminently in God because God can create hardness.

                                                                    (Actually)
                                                  Formally
The presence of   (Subjectively)                      (Potentially)
a property                                   Eminently
                           Objectively
 

• Two causal principles known through the light of nature:
1. there must be as much reality in the cause as in the effect, i.e., if A causes B, then A must contain B's properties either formally or eminently.

NOTE: How this somewhat reasonable (a property cannot come from nothing)
2. The ultimate cause of an idea I containing F objectively (representing F) must contain F formally or eminently (causal principle of representation).

NOTE: How this seems less reasonable.

1. I find within my mind the idea of God, i.e. the idea of a being which is infinite in all respects and unitary.
2. But divine infinity cannot be understood as mere lack of finitude, and consequently its idea is not merely that of an indefinite or potential infinity
3. The idea of God not materially false (e.g., as the idea of cold is because cold may be taken to be nothing but lack of heat),    because it contains objectively (it represents) an infinite amount of reality.
4. Hence, the causal principle of representation entails that the idea of God is caused by God himself.

NOTES:
Descartes rejects the empiricist view of infinity as mere lack of completion
Descartes claims that although we can understand infinity, we cannot comprehend it.

Since the senses obfuscate this result, Descartes inquires whether he could exists if God didn't. He so provides a second argument in the form "If I exist, then God exists," which has the first argument as a part.
Basic argument: I exist; hence, either 1) I have no cause; or 2) I have a cause. But 1) is false (a cause for everything), hence 2) is true.  If I have a cause, then, either (a) I caused myself, or (b) a being or beings different from me and from God caused me, or (c) God caused me.  But (a) and (b) are false; so, God caused me, and hence he exists.

a. I am not self-caused because:

• I would have made myself omniscient, which I could have easily done since it is harder to cause a substance (myself) than a property of it (my knowledge).

NOTE: Descartes here uses the Aristotelian idea that a substance is more fundamental than its properties.
• A cause must be contemporaneous with its effect.  Hence, my existence in the past cannot be the cause of my existence in the present.  So, all parts of my life span are causally independent of each other.  But I'm not aware of any power whereby I produce myself now. But if I had such power, since I'm a thinking thing, I'd be aware of it.

NOTE: Denial of ontological inertia & preservation = continuous production.  Moreover, my parents do not cause my existence because they don't conserve me
Problems:
• How does D. know he's only a thinking thing? Is he justified in looking at himself just qua a thinking thing?
• Transparency of the mind taken as self-evident. To be looked at later.
 

4. The idea of God is not adventitious, since it did not come to me unexpectedly, like ideas of sensible things do, and not factitious, since I'm unable to change anything in it.  Hence, it is innate, i.e., implanted in me by God as a mark of a craftsman.
NOTE: the distinction between factitious and innate ideas in terms of my ability to change them is problematic, as we'll see in Meditation V.

5. So, God exists and being perfect cannot be deceitful.  This guarantees that what I perceive clearly and distinctly (through natural light) is true even when I don't consider the proof any longer.

6. The Meditation, which had started by trying to efface sensible images, concludes with the the contemplation of God. Hence, the Meditation starts with images and ends with concepts

7. Issues:
    i) Are D's proofs for God's existence convincing?
    ii) what's the mark of a clear and distinct idea?
    iii) the Cartesian circle: proving the existence of God by clear and distinct ideas in order to validate clear and distinct ideas.
    D's reply based on memory (AT VII, 246)