Descartes' Method in Meditations on First Philosophy Savannah McClendon College

In order to investigate the intricacies of Descartes’ method, we must first come to an understanding of what Descartes is hoping to accomplish by use of it, and the true immediacy with which he writes. The objectives he introduces, namely to prove that “the human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists” (3), are not wants for Descartes, but absolute necessity. For Descartes, the world without God is an unregulated breeding ground of happy vice and endless convenience at the cost of morality; a world in which truth has no value and nothing can be certain; where he can deny his daughter right to the moment of her untimely death without consequence; where his only reason for continuing to live is to carve out the path of escape from this treachery for all damned or lost others. The ideal of his philosophy and the purpose of his methodical project then becomes to uncover what is certain - what is free from all error, from all sources of doubt or the temptation to doubt - and to find God within that certainty.

In the First Meditation is is established that he will accomplish this through radical doubt, in which all sources of potential error are suspended so that he must assume everything is a lie (or a liar) before he...