Rene Descartes: An interpretation
This is an excerpt from the paper...
1. My discipline is philosophy. This is not a particularly popular subject to study today, and is becoming even less popular as people become less and less sure of the economy. Philosophy as an academic subject epitomizes everything that people believe to be frivolous about higher education. It is alright in theory but isn't practical. But it is this very lack of practicality that has attracted me to the discipline. I think that there will be time enough to be an ant for the rest of my life and to be concerned with getting and spending and laying up stores for the winter. I do not believe that the most important thing that I should be doing as a student is to be studying a discipline such as business and so effectively preparing for that time when I will not be a student. Moreover, I believe both that my life will be more rewarding and that I will be better able to meet all the challenges (from the economic to the moral) that life is bound to offer to me if I take the time now to study what some of the most intelligent men and women have thought and written about the important issues that face humanity.2. I have chosen to write about Rene Descartes for two reasons. The first is that I believe that many people today do not understand his theories and I want to be able in my own mind at least to have a clear sense of the dimensions and significance of his work. The second reason that I chose Descartes is that I believe that he is one of the most important of all of the mode
. . .
of them to a position about the certainty of a great many things with such ease and rapidity that we might well doubt the sincerity of his professed doubts to begin with. The journey that Descartes takes begins with his assumption that humans are imperfect: This is something that the Christian orthodoxy to which he adhered had taught him. (It was also no doubt something that he had come to believe through the process of watching the many imperfections of those around him.) However, imperfect humans can conceive of a perfect God. And it would be impossible for such imperfect creatures as ourselves to imagine such a perfect creature as God if God did not in fact actually exist - and through his objective, real existence inspire us imperfect humans to understand the idea of God. There is a clear circularity to this argument (which is called in philosophical realms the Cartesian Circle) which limits its appeal to us as citizens of late modernity. Its appeal must also be limited for those who do not believe in the same kind of perfect God that Descartes found at the center of his universe.
5 and 6. Despite the relative arcaneness of Descartes's philosophy, his statement that "I think, therefore I am" ( Cogito ergo sum) is one of the
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Rene Descartes, Central Descartes's, God Descartes, , Indeed Descartes, God God, Cartesian Circle, Rene Meditations, perfect god, Descartes Meditations, York Penguin, rene descartes, descartes rene, mind body, actually exist, imperfect humans, descartes arguing,
Approximate Word count = 1226
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
