Why does Descartes introduce the “evil genius, supremely powerful and clever” into the First Meditation? What role is this figure assigned to play?
2007-11-25 02:59:27 · 4 answers · asked by ba$$hunter 2 in Arts & Humanities ➔ Philosophy
The point of the Meditations at that point are to get back to basics. An indisputable rock upon which to build the rest of philosophy. So to find out what is indisputable, Descartes begins thinking of ways that what we might be mistaken.
He starts with the idea of dreams. Even if we have not experienced a dream which seemed so real that it was indistinguishable from reality, we can imagine such a dream. And if such a dream can occur, how can we know if we are dreaming at any point in time? No sensory impression, then, can be trusted INDISPUTABLY.
What does that leave us? It leaves our thoughts and it leaves things based on thought. Memory, imagination, and whole fields of study based not on the external word, but on the world of ideas. Logic, math, and so on. Even in a dream, 1+1 = 2.
Your memory SEEMS to correlate to things that happened in the past, and math SEEMS to be a consistent system... but what if they're not? What would it take to make these things false? This is where the evil genius comes in. If some outside entity can alter your thoughts, none of them may be valid. If - every time you realize that 1+1 is actually 3 - this genius distracts your line of thinking and erases the memory of it, you might come to this realization a hundred times a day and never know.
The evil genius is just a way to suggest that maybe reasoning is imperfect. He mentions later that you might get the same result if you just assume that the Creator is less than perfect or absent altogether. If we can't know that our reason is perfect, it may not be. So we can't INDISPUTABLY count on even our thoughts!
2007-11-25 03:24:12 · answer #1 · answered by Doctor Why 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋
I read this back in my intro class awhile back, so this might not be the best answer. But... he serves as literary tool for a hypothetical reality. Descartes tries to understand what he can consider real, which proves to be quite difficult. He decides to abandon all of what he considers to be real and find some foundation. The evil genius is introduced as a figure that "could" have created this reality we live in, thus making it not truly real. Again, I'm not positive how acurate or how much help this will be, should be pretty good though.
2007-11-25 03:11:50 · answer #2 · answered by stalvacchia 1 · 0⤊ 1⤋
They themselves use systemtatic doubt in an effort to attain certain truth. Descartes is not a skeptic in the ancient Greek sense, but rather in the sense (no pun) that we must be skeptical of what we perceive through our senses. The systematic doubt, however, was a tool used to find out what it is we may know without doubt: I am a thinking thing...
2016-05-25 07:51:43 · answer #3 · answered by ? 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
He is an imaginary prop to hold up a fatally flawed argument.
Love and blessings Don
2007-11-25 03:05:52 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 2⤋