More Meditations
I’ve been continuing to go through the Meditations, and this morning it struck me how beautifully and succinctly Descartes has captured the texture of mathematical truth in his description of the ontological argument. As early as Plato you can see philosophers lusting after the kind of concrete truth that people associate with mathematics, but Descartes is one of the only philosophers who actually manages to adequately characterize why mathematics seem to “truthy” and make some headway toward garnering that degree of certainty about other subjects. As with most of Descartes’ genius, I think this is intricately tied up with his method of doubting; the idea that a triangle’s longest side is opposite its largest angle is so compelling because we simply cannot imagine a scenario in which it would not be true (that is, as long as we are being rigorous about our idea of what constitutes a triangle). If you go along with Descartes’ idea that existence is a perfection, then it seems as if it would follow that you could not imagine a way in which God could not exist, since by his very definition God contains all perfections. It’s easy to dismiss Descartes’ ontological argument out of hand without giving it the attention it deserves, but as I am reading it, it always strikes me as one of the most concise and beautiful arguments ever devised.
However, Meditation 6 really befuddled me this time around; perhaps I was simply exhausted because I read the whole thing in the matter of half a day or so, but I really didn’t get exactly how our faith in the outside world was propped up. Further, I’m not sure what degree of rigor Descartes thinks we should apply to our normal, everyday lives and the way we critically process our perceptions and ideas. Perhaps the other folks in the group will have something to say about that.
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