Monday, February 4, 2008
discourse part 4 page 21-22
In the final part of part for I found that Descarte was really focusing on how God is perfect and exists because we think he does. I find this to be a very confusing concept to comprehend. I feel that it contradicts what he says earlier in the discourse. He says that everything we think has some type of truth in it, but later says that since we are not perfect we can never be sure about things we think. It seems to me that he talks in circle and in every section of the discourse and in the meditations .
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3 comments:
I agree that Descartes is a little off with his reasoning. When he talks about God's existence, I question his reasoning for believing God exists. It is wonderful that he believes in God. However, the proof of God's existence he has wrote, thus far, does not satisfy me at all. For me, his reasoning of God's existence is just silly. Nevertheless, going back to your comment, I do not think Descartes contradicts himself. What he says is on page 21 is, "for reason does not at all dictate to us that what we thus see or imagine is true. But it does dictate to us that all our ideas or notions must have some foundation of truth, for it would not be possible that God, who is all perfect and all truthful, would have put them in us without that." Then a little later in the paragraph he says, "reason also dictates to us that our thoughts cannot ALL be true, since we are not all-perfect." Thus, he does not say everything we think is the truth, but rather he says our ideas and notions have some type of truth. Descartes definitely does not believe that everything we think is the truth because we are not perfect (only god is perfect). We are imperfect beings and thus, we can get confused to what is true and what is false. He believes there is some type of truth in everything we think and since there is only some type of truth there can also be falsity in our thinking. I definitely agree with him that our thinking can fool us. Think about perceptions and how one's eyes can be easily fooled. I don't know if you know of the picture dealing with perceptions with the old lady or the young woman. If you don’t take a look at this site: http://www.worldtrans.org/TP/TP1/TP1-9.HTML. Some people see a young lady when they look at the picture and others see a young woman. I personally saw a young lady and had to really look hard to see the old woman. And if no one told me the old woman was in the picture I would have never seen her. So, in this case, there was some truth to my thinking, however there was some falsity to my thinking (I was blind to the old woman in the picture until it was pointed out to me). Thus, our perceptions can fool us indefinitely. That is just a very basic example. Unfortunately, we all fall victim to having falsity in our perceptions. It is human nature. After all, we are imperfect.
great point. because we are imperfect, our thoughts can be false (they are not veridical, as it is sometimes said--they are not bound to be true). but math gets by that somehow. how?
Actually, it is funny you ask that question because as I was writing the post for the Meditations I was trying to think, is math "perfect"? Since you mentioned in class how God is maybe a representation relating to mathetmatics, that question crossed my mind. Of course there can be mistakes made in mathematics, however, a mathematical concepts can be proven to be true. There is not some falsity and some truth in mathematics. Mathematical concepts are always true. I guess this is why Descartes loved using mathematical examples because he knew them to be true (i.e. the triangle example).
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