Lecture Notes

Lecture Notes: September 23

Note that page numbers herein refer to the Adam and Tannery page numbers, located in the margins of the text.

Meditation II

Read Title of MII
Q: Do you know about your mind or your body, better?
What body? - Remember: we've doubted the existence of a physical world.

Having doubted everything, we need some starting point for rebuilding

Archimedes and the lever.

The cogito

Not:

1) Whatever thinks, exists
2) I think.
:. I exist

That would require previous knowledge of 1) and 2).
Also, knowledge of the structure of an argument, and logic in general

It must be more of a pure intuition

What is the 'I' that exists?

Descartes concludes that he's a thinking thing.
He has thoughts.
What can he learn from these thoughts?
Thoughts imply a thinker, perhaps a relation between the thinker and the object of thought
What do the objects of thought tell us?

Not much, because we can think of things that don't even exist, e.g. unicorns
Still, there's something certain - privileged access, indefeasibility

I can be certain that I'm having my thoughts, even if the relation between them and their causes is still in doubt

We can get certainty only inside - not of outside (yet?)

The cogito doesn't prove that Descartes exists (or existed). Why not?

The wax

Another approach: start with the physical objects
Q: How do we know about physical objects? through senses?
Descartes disagrees
p 34: this is the conclusion of an argument about the wax.
p 30: the story of the wax

All sensory qualities of the wax are different after it's brought near the flame

But it's the same wax

What we know of the wax can't be the accidental, changeable sensory properties

It must be the properties that are grasped by the understanding alone
The wax is "extended flexible, and mutable"

judging is done by mind, about objects
too much confusion in senses
we'll come back to this problem with Locke and Berkeley

Locke mainly agrees, comes from Newtonian physics
Berkeley disagrees in a strong way
This is a big question

Read p 31 -> "not have an image of what the wax is..."
But he has an image of the wax
the imagination is our capacity for sensory images
It doesn't yield the essence of the wax
similarly for wax in general

The argument:
1) Knowledge must be certain (firm and lasting)
2) What we get from the senses is uncertain
3) So our senses do not give us knowledge
4) We do have knowledge about the wax
:. So our knowledge of physical objects must come from the mind

Descartes's Metaphysics (what exists)

1) God

2) Finite intelligences

3) extended objects

Remember: this is all hypothetical
we don't know that any objects yet exist.
the mind is known better than the body
all of these reflections just bring us back to the mind: they are thoughts
contributing to better knowledge of the mind (p 33)