Skepticism I. INTRODUCTION 1. Objective of essa

4. Brief statement on Saint Thomas Aquinas' approach to theology.

II. SKEPTICISM--THE APPROACHES OF THOMAS AQUINAS AND RENE DESCARTES

3. Descartes and two proofs of God.

4. Aquinas and the first cause argument.

5. Similarity of Descartes' second proof to that of Aquinas.

6. Descartes' Demon Arguments and how this differentiates Descartes from Aquinas.

8. Descartes' and the certainty of his own thoughts.

Concluding comments on Aquinas and Descartes.

This essay compares and analyzes Rene Descartes and Thomas Aquinas with regard to their treatment of skepticism. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650 A.D.) would seem to be coming from different philosophical and theological positions. However, although Aquinas was a priest of the Dominican Order and probably the greatest of the scholastics, he and Descartes, a seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher, do agree on some points. It would seem, nevertheless, that one's first impression of the two would be that they are quite dissimilar. But in both of these great thinkers there are common threads of thought.

From the point of view of epistemology, Aquinas and Descartes share the concept that knowledge is innate and is discovered

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op of Canterbury; and (2) The first cause argument, which was one of the proofs developed by Saint Thomas Aquinas by way of Aristotle. Besides being Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm was a member of the Benedictine Order. Anselm describes God as a Being who is so perfect that further perfection would be impossible to imagine. Thus Anselm states: "So truly, therefore, dost thou exist, o Lord, my God, that thou canst not be conceived not to exist; and rightly. For, if a mind could conceive of a being better than thee, the creature would rise above the Creator, and this is most absurd" (Mavrodes and Hackett, 1967, pp. 95-96). Descartes reformulated Anselm's ontological argument so that it is assumed that existence is a property or predicate. And so, Descartes states in "Meditation V": "While from the fact that I cannot conceive God without existence, it follows that existence is inseparable from Him, and hence that He really exists . . . the necessity of the existence of God determines me to think in this way." (Descartes, 1969, p. 205). However, Anselm's proof of God as used by Descartes is only shown as an introduction to Aquinas and his proof of God's existence. The following theistic argument used by Descartes was initia
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Approximate Word count = 2097
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)