Descartes Meditations 4, 5, & 6

Unfortunately, due to the snow days we were forced to compress our discussion of Descartes’ last three meditations into two days. However, we were able to hit on a majority of the most significant arguments from this section of the Meditations.

We started our discussion with an overview of Descartes’ explanation for the existence of error in a world created by a perfect God. Descartes’ argues that error comes about through an interaction between our understanding and our will, in which our will to apply our understanding to something outstrips the bounds of our understanding. Therefore, we concluded along with Descartes that error can only be avoided when we check our will and keep it from seeking things that we cannot have a full understanding of. This seemed self-explanatory to the class and there were no major objections.

Next, we addressed the concept of moving from our thoughts or understanding to an object. Descartes suggests that there is an object out there that is in our thoughts such as the triangle. We were presented with the question about what is it in objects that we understand clearly and distinctly? Also, what is it in the material body that we understand clearly and distinct? We concluded that extension helped us derive a clear and distinct perception of the material body, as the essence of extension is measurability. Consequently, anything with properties that can be quantified we can understand clearly and distinctly. However, the objection was brought up that this is still dubious because all information that we receive from the world comes through sense perception. For example, even though we can measure the extension of a body with a yard stick, our reading of the yard stick depends on our perception of visual data, while furthermore, the yard stick itself was produced by another human who was relying on sense perception to make it.

Sense perception, however, is the link that helps us move from thoughts to comprehending objects. Sense does not just lead us to believe a perception but helps us understand that there is a cause for our perception. Descartes argues that God would not deceive us through our senses, because he is perfect and deception is an imperfection. This would seem to be his answer to the objection in the previous paragraph, but the class did not find it to be a very convincing one.