Meditations, Objections, and Replies (Hackett Classics)

by René Descartes

Whether ideas need a formal cause for their existence; God as self-caused; that we have the idea of an infinite being; the ontological argument for God’s existence; and the real distinction between mind and body.

the dependence of the mind to the body.

mind rules the body

whether anything can be in the mind of which we are unaware;

subconscious?

cogito; the kind of knowledge an atheist can possess; whether God can deceive; the status of the eternal truths; and human freedom as indifference of judgment.

Cogito, what can atheists know? Can God fool people? Do "eternal truths" exist? Is human judgement free from judgement?

a single bloc of certainty, without any cracks, in which everything is arranged such that no truth can be taken away without the whole collapsing.

This presents Descartes with a dilemma: he cannot give up the motion of the earth without abandoning his whole system, but the motion of the earth, which he

thinks has been supported by “very certain and very evident demonstrations,” has been prohibited by the Church;

namely, God and the soul—are chief among those that ought to be demonstrated with the aid of philosophy rather than theology. For although it suffices for us believers to believe by faith that the human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists,

human soul exists and does not perish with the body

certainly no unbelievers seem capable of being persuaded of any religion or even of almost any moral virtue, until these two are first proven to them by natural reason.

atheists will stay atheists until the existence of the soul is proven

faith is a gift from God, the very same one who gives the grace that is necessary for believing the rest can also give the grace to believe that he exists.

those without this knowledge are blameworthy.

fuck those who don't believe in God when it's common sense

convinces them that the soul dies with the body, while it is by faith alone that they hold the contrary position.

many irreligious people who refuse to believe that God exists and that the human mind is distinct from the body—

its errors would be corrected by you

that the mind is distinct from the body

we can doubt all things,

the mind, through the exercise of its own freedom, supposes the nonexistence of all those things about whose existence it can have even the least doubt.

soul is immortal is that we form a concept of the soul that is as lucid as possible and utterly distinct from every concept of a body.

things that must be [14] created by God in order to exist, are by their very nature incorruptible, and can never cease to exist, unless, by the same God’s denying his concurrence to them, they be reduced to nothingness.

things created by god cannot be destroyed

body,

is a substance and hence it too can ...

the human body does become something different, merely as a result of the fact that a change in the shape of some of its parts has taken place. It follows from these considerations that a body can very easily perish, whereas the mind by its nature is immortal.

had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.

if you want new discoveries, you have to completely start over from square one

I will apply myself earnestly and unreservedly to this general demolition of my opinions.

undermining the foundations will cause whatever has been built upon them to crumble of its own accord, I will attack straightaway those principles which supported everything I once believed.

I have noticed that the senses are sometimes deceptive;

But on what grounds could one deny that these [19] hands and this entire body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to the insane,

the things seen during slumber are, as it were, like painted images, which could only have been produced in the likeness of true things, and that therefore at least these general things—eyes, head, hands, and the whole body—are not imaginary things, but are true and exist.

For whether I am awake or asleep, 2 plus 3 make 5, and a square does not have more than 4 sides. It does not seem possible that such obvious truths should be subject to the suspicion of being false.

Therefore I suppose that everything I see is false. I believe that none of what my deceitful memory represents ever existed. I have no senses whatever. Body, shape, extension, movement, and place are all chimeras. What then will be true? Perhaps just the single fact that nothing is certain.

But there is some deceiver or other who is supremely powerful and supremely sly and who is always deliberately deceiving me. Then too there is no doubt that I exist, if he is deceiving me.

thought exists; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am; I exist—this is certain.

if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist.