Study Questions for Meditations III
1.
How does Descartes argue that clarity and distinctness is the criterion for knowledge?
2.
What raises some (small) doubt about this?
3.
How does Descartes propose to answer this doubt?
4.
What kind of thoughts are properly called ‘ideas’?
5.
What kind of thoughts can literally be false?
6.
What connects the idea of a thing to the thing itself?
7.
What principle restricts what could be the cause of something?
8.
What does Descartes mean by his talk of how much objective reality there is in some idea?
9.
What does Descartes mean by objective reality? By formal reality?
10.
Why does Descartes refuse to worry about the possibility that we form our idea of infinity simply as a negation of finitude?
11.
Is Descartes right to say that our idea of God is ‘utterly clear and distinct’?
Discuss.
12.
What is Descartes’ view of the causal relations between different times?
13.
How does Descartes finally explain his idea of God?
Study Questions for Meditation IV
1.
What worries Descartes about his conclusion that God is not a deceiver?
2.
What is Descartes’ first explanation of our tendency to make mistakes?
3.
What two causes are involved in producing Descartes’ errors?
4.
What is it about the will that leads us to commit such errors?
5. Why does Descartes think we have no reason to complain of the limited scope of our intellects? Why do we have no reason to complain of the unlimited scope of our will?
6. What does Descartes’ appeal to ‘privation’ add to his theodicy here?
Study Questions for Meditation V
1.
What shows (for Descartes) that our ideas of things like triangles are not just invented or made up by us?
2.
What shows that it isn’t just experience that has placed these ideas in us?
3.
What new argument for the existence of God emerges from this discussion?
4.
Do you agree that existence is inseparable from the idea of God? Is it any more separable from the idea of a horse? (After all, a non-existent horse is not much of a horse!)
5.
How does the existence of God support our convictions about various theorems even when we don’t keep the proofs of them clearly in mind?
Study Questions for Meditation VI

1.
In what respects is Descartes now certain that material things can exist?
2.
What theory of the imagination does Descartes propose here?
3.
What shows that the imagination is limited in a way that our understanding is not?
4.
What justified Descartes’ (pre-meditation) opinion that there was a body that
‘belonged’ to him in a unique way?
5.
What demonstrates for Descartes that his mind and his body are in principle distinct things that can exist separately?
6.
How does Descartes qualify his conclusion here, that the material bodies we perceive by our senses really do exist?
7.
Why is Descartes dubious about some of the things he has been ‘taught by nature’?
8.
What conclusions does Descartes think we should and shouldn’t draw from our experience of heat and pain when we get close to a fire?
9.
What is the ‘proper purpose’ of the sensory perceptions that nature has given us?
10.
When does this purpose seem to fail?
11.
Explain what worries Descartes about the case of dropsy.
12.
What is Descartes’ explanation of what goes wrong in the case of dropsy?
13.
How does this help to justify God’s having set things up in this way (and excuse
God of the charge of being a deceiver, when it comes to such cases)? Discuss.
14.
How does Descartes now propose to distinguish dreaming from waking?