Study Questions for Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: Meditations One and Two

The numbers in parentheses refer to the paragraphs of the Bennett version of the Meditations (available here in a version with paragraph numbers). (If the paragraph numbers aren't showing up when you open the file in D2L, try opening it with Adobe Reader.)  There are 11 paragraphs in his version of the first meditation and 16 in the second meditation.

Note: I hope you will read and ponder all the study questions below, but the writing assignment includes only some of them, namely:  Write out answers to study questions #1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 13, 16, and 17.

Meditation One

1.      What task does Descartes set for himself at the beginning of this meditation?

2.      How does he propose to accomplish his task? (Paragraph 2)

3.      What is the first reason he finds to doubt the evidence of his senses? (Paragraph 3)

4.      Why does he think that this reason is not enough to undermine all his sense-based beliefs? (beginning of Paragraph 4 – the dialogue between Doubtful and Hopeful )

5.      What further reason does he then propose for doubting his opinions? (end of Paragraph 4) 

6.      What sorts of beliefs survive even this reason for doubting them? (Paragraphs 5-7)

7.      What hypothesis then leads him to doubt even these remaining beliefs? (Paragraph 8)

8.      What other hypothesis does he then consider, which leads him to the same conclusion (i.e., the conclusion that “doubts can properly be raised about any of my former beliefs ... on the basis of powerful and well thought-out reasons.”)? (Paragraph 9)

9.      For what purpose does Descartes suppose “an evil genius, supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me”? (Paragraph 11)

Note: you should now be at the end of Meditation 1 about to start Meditation 2.  If you are somewhere else in the text, then you have probably lost track of which paragraph you are supposed to be looking at when you answer each question.  Look for the paragraph numbers in the margins.

Meditation Two

10.  Note how Descartes works his way towards his first indubitable conclusion: “I am, I exist.” (Paragraph 3, in Bennett’s version, another dialogue between Hopeful and Doubtful)  How do you think he would respond if someone said: “How do you know you really exist?  You might just be dreaming that you exist!”?

11.  Why can’t he imagine he doesn’t exist? (That doesn’t seem so hard to imagine!)  How do you think Descartes would answer this question if it came up at this point in his meditations?

12.  What did Descartes used to think he was before he set out on these meditations? (Paragraph 5)

13.  What do his current meditations lead him to conclude about himself?  (Paragraphs 6-8)

14.  The passage about the wax is difficult.  Descartes is using this example to arrive at a very general and (to his mind) very important conclusion about how we can acquire true knowledge.  Why does Descartes think he cannot know the wax through perception? (Paragraph 11)

15.  Why can he not know it through his imagination? (Paragraph 12)

16.  With what faculty (or power) of his mind does he know it?  (Paragraphs 12-13, reiterated in Paragraph 16)

17.  Descartes has now established (to his satisfaction, at least) that he does know something for sure: he knows that he exists.  Do you agree with him that he does know this for sure (and that you, therefore, know for sure that you exist)?  Do you agree with him when he says that he has “powerful and well thought-out reasons” to conclude that he doesn’t know anything else for sure (and, therefore, that you don’t know anything else for sure either)?  Why or why not?  Does the possibility that you might be living in the Matrix (or some such virtual reality device) give you a good reason to doubt all your beliefs?