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Doubt in Descartes’s Meditations
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In the Meditations, Descartes joins an early modern European search for a secure basis for knowledge. His method of doubt serves a particular purpose; it is not a stage that every philosophy must pass through.
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A discovery with limits
Follow the widening doubt to the cogito: Descartes’s recognition that he exists while he is thinking, even if he is deceived. Keep that result apart from the later arguments about mind, body and God.
Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 48
How far can doubt take us?
Descartes moves from deliberate doubt to the certainty that he is thinking, a starting point the lesson keeps apart from his further claims about mind and body.