Study Questions For Descartes.
I.
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Why does Descartes decide to give up every belief he can find a reason to doubt?
What worries Descartes about the false beliefs he once held?
What is the source of the beliefs Descartes has accepted as ‘most true’?
What beliefs does the ‘dream’ hypothesis put into doubt?
What beliefs seem to survive the possibility that he is dreaming?
What possibility undermines even those beliefs for Descartes?
What worries Descartes now that he has found reason to doubt all of these
beliefs?
8. How does Descartes propose to deal with this worry?
II.
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What belief remains beyond doubt for Descartes?
What question does this one certainty lead to?
What sort of thing does Descartes claim he is?
What features of the self does Descartes claim to be certain of?
What does Descartes’ discussion of the wax aim to show?
What conclusion does Descartes reach here, about our knowledge of ‘body’ and
of ‘mind’?
III.
1. What rule does Descartes accept as his criterion of truth?
2. Why does God come in at this point? (What worry does he need to lay to rest, if
he’s to make any more progress here?)
3. What is Descartes’ idea of ‘idea’?
4. Can ideas in this strict sense be true or false?
5. Do you think our ideas of external objects resemble those objects? Explain!
6. What is the difference between the natural light and our natural impulses to accept
certain beliefs?
7. Ideas are ‘modes of thought’; they don’t differ, for Descartes, in that respect—but
they do differ in another respect. What is that?
8. What does Descartes mean by ‘objective reality’? ‘Objective’ here refers to the
content or representational nature of an idea; what an idea is formally (just in
itself) is a mode of thought, but what it is objectively is whatever that idea
represents. So objective reality is a measure of the reality of the thing represented
by the idea.
9. What are the causal principles Descartes invokes to argue that God must exist?
That there must be at least as much reality is a cause as in its effect, and that the
reality present in any original (if not in the intermediate) cause must be formal
reality, since it is only at this level that causes can ultimately operate.
10. Outline the final argument Descartes gives here for God’s existence. What do
you think of it? Can you identify premises you would question or reject? (Can
we accept his talk of perfections ‘he cannot grasp, but can somehow reaching in
[his] thought’?) Do you agree with Descartes’ metaphor, in which our idea of
God is like the craftman’s mark stamped on his work?
11. How does Descartes justify rejecting the possibility that he himself will become
perfect enough to account for the origins of his idea of God?
12. What radical doctrine about existence and time does Descartes propound here?