Discourse On Method and Meditations On First Philosophy - Essay Example

Dis On Method and Meditations on First Philosophy The existence of the material world was a common idea of Plato, Descartes, medieval thinkers and Aristotle. Descartes had a mathematical view of the world. He had a Pythagorean mystical alignment to mathematics. He ended up putting an absolute focus to mathematics. He firmly believed in deductive reasoning and facts contributing much to metaphysics and epistemology. Material things exist since Descartes perceive them as objects of pure mathematics (Descartes, Weissman & Bluhm, 1996).

In paying a very close attention to the imagination, it seems an application of relating faculty to one’s bodies, therefore, its existence. At examining the difference between pure intellectual and imagination, he uses figures such as triangles, bound by three lines, chiliagon bound by thousands of sides and Pentagon. He points that the force of habit drives one to imagine something whenever one thinks of a corporeal thing. The new effort on the side of the mind that makes one imagine rather than need it to understand defines the difference between pure intellectual and imagination (Descartes, Weissman & Bluhm, 1996).

The power of imagination differing from the power of understanding is not essential to an own essence. The power of imagination relies on something distinct from the person in question. Despite the existence of the body, it is by means of the character’s body that brings an imagination of corporeal things. The mind, therefore, looks at the ideas that exist in it when it understands. While when it imagines, it reflects on the body and intuits something that conform to idea perceived by the sense or understood by the same mind.

Therefore, an imagination is actualized in this manner if the body exists. Therefore, from a probability, the body exists (Descartes, Weissman & Bluhm, 1996).From the corporeal nature the object of pure mathematics, perception of things increases with means of senses. With the help of the memory, they appear to have reached the imagination. First, we sense that we have a head, feet, and other parts of the body. Pleasure and pain hunger enables sensing of appetites (Descartes, Weissman & Bluhm, 1996).

One can also sense things found in the environment and use that basis to distinguish the earth, sky, and seas among others. The ideas from the mind are much vivid, explicit, and distinctive than those knowingly and deliberately formed through mediation or found within the memory. They all seem first not to come from own self. Therefore, the alternative was that they came from other things outside the self. Therefore, it seems that a faculty produced some perceptions outside the body (Descartes, Weissman & Bluhm, 1996).

As many ideas formed without the will and the cooperation of the body, there has to be an alternative, noble power outside the body that made things happens the way they do. That power could be from God or any other power outside the body. Descartes tells of this power being either the power of nature or the power of God. Since nature is omniscient, and God is not a deceiver, nature bestows all sensation on people (Descartes, Weissman & Bluhm, 1996).Works CitedDescartes, R., Weissman, D., & Bluhm, W. T. (1996).

Discourse on the method: And, Meditations on first philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.