Within meditation one Descartes subjects all of his beliefs regarding sensory data and even existence to the strongest and most hyperbolic of doubts. He invokes the notion of the all powerful, malign demon who could be deceiving him regarding sensory experience and even his understanding of the simplest mathematical and logical truths in order to attain an indubitable premise that is epistemologically formidable. In meditation one Descartes has three areas of doubt, doubt of his own existence, doubt of the existence of God, and doubt of the existence of the external world. Descartes' knowledge of these three areas are subjected to three types of scepticism the first where he believes that his senses are being deceived 'these senses played me false, and it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have once deceived us'. The second of the forms of sceptic

Descartes' attempts to extricate himself from his sceptical doubts of the meditations had a varying degree of success, his doubt of his own existence was well surmounted with the indubitable 'cogito' argument. The second of his doubts, that of the existence of God was not extricated as successfully with the unconvincing trademark argument and the out of date ontological argument. Descartes then went on to tackling his doubt regarding the existence of the external world, which was done well but was based on the shady proofs for the existence of God. Descartes may not have proven the existence of God or the existence of the external world however he did produce a new style of philosophy in which he attempted to base all of his epistemological knowledge (or beliefs) on a single indubitable premise, this style of philosophy now known as foundationalism has been and is still used by philosophers today at great credit to Descartes, Rene Descartes proved himself within this book to b!

Now that Descartes realised that he was a thinking being he focused his efforts on trying to prove the existence of God for this Descartes has two arguments based on a priori reasoning, the Ontological argument and the Trademark argument.

cause must be the external world. Descartes needed God to prove the existence of corporeal things because God, being a 'Being of all perfection's' would not lie to him about the existence of such things. This conclusion to Descartes' meditations would have been an acceptable conclusion if he had succeeded to prove the existence of God to a satisfactory degree, however this was not the case so instead his 'proof' of the existence of corporeal things is clouded by a thin veil of theology.

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which one can distinguish between being awake and being asleep'. The aforementioned malign demon was Descartes third method of doubt as he realised God would not deceive him.

The ontological argument again fails to prove God's existence to a satisfactory degree, however, Descartes continues to use these proofs of God's existence to then move on to try to prove the existence of material things, 'God possesses the power to produce everything that I am capable of perceiving with distinctness, and I have never deemed that anything was impossible for Him'.

The second argument Descartes presents for the existence of God is the ontological argument where he says '... it is necessary that I should attribute to Him every sort of perfection, although I do not get so far as to enumerate them all... and this necessity suffices to make me conclude (after having recognised that existence is a perfection) that this first and sovereign being really exists.' This argument put simply means that God is perfect and as it is more perfect to exist than not exist God exists. There are many criticisms of the above argument for the existence of God these include criticisms put forward by Immanuel Kant and the Fideist's.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2133
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)