El Conocimiento Segun Kant

Descartes's VIth Meditation
Descartes' third meditation of his Mediations on First Philosophy, he goes from searching into the nature of doubt and knowledge to proving the existence of God. Descartes uses the non-ontological argument to prove the existence of God. I believe there are problems in this argument which will be discussed in this paper. First I look at the argument itself beforeattempting an analysis, where Descartes’ objections and responses will be argued.

Descartes’ first major statement in the third meditation is that “whatever I clearly and distinctly grasp is true.” But, he objects, there are many things which one thinks they have a clear and distinct grasp upon, then later recognizes they only had an idea of the thing. Descartes questions if he errs because God is adeceiver. This idea I feel is a weak argument. He then sets the reader up for the argument for God with the statement that “until I know these two things, if God exists and if he deceives, I can never be completely certain of anything else.”

Before arguing for God’s existence, Descartes turns to the grouping of his thoughts. He divides his thoughts into three categories: ideas, or images ofthings, and emotions or judgments. According to Descartes, these ideas or emotions can’t actually be untrue, because when he thinks about something and has an idea, he is still thinking of this thing, similar to the cogito, the belief that since he is thinking, he exists. He says that the only errors in his thoughts are actually the way in which he interprets them – his judgments. Descartes thendefines what he means by “the light of nature.” The light of nature seems to mean to me that one has a spur-of-the-moment reaction to believe something, and that something is beyond doubt from then on. After briefly discussing the source of ideas and how an idea of something is often quite different from the actual thing, Descartes turns to the major argument of this meditation, the non-ontologicalargument. Descartes’ argument is a posteriori because it is based on experience and observation. He is not arguing something into existence through definition, but through concepts.
The first principle of the argument: one can only make a mistake in the judgment of ideas, but not in what the ideas are. The second main point is summarized as saying that an effect cannot have more “reality” than itscause. Ideas though can never appear greater than they are as Descartes says, “something cannot come from nothing” – an effect cannot be more real or perfect than its cause.

Descartes establishes that “although one idea may arise from another, this can’t go back to infinity; it must eventually arrive at a primary idea whose cause is an “archetype” containing all that the idea containspresented.” He seems to be saying there is a primary source for ideas, according to him, God. Descartes then talks about categories of ideas to explain how some ideas must be innate. Descartes thinks that the idea of God could not have been produced by him. He defines “God” as “infinite substance, independent, supremely intelligent, and supremely powerful.” His reason for this belief is that, beingfinite, he could not have thought of the idea of an infinite being without that idea having come from God. He then claims that there is more reality in the infinite than in the finite, and since there can’t be more reality in an effect than in its cause, the infinite must have caused the finite.

After determining that the only possible explanation in terms of causation is God, Descartes offers somepossible criticisms and responses to his argument. He asks if maybe he is greater than he assumed, if perhaps existence is not derived from God, and if anyone other than God can preserve or re-create each moment. Finally, Descartes explores how he got the idea of God. He arrives at the conclusion that the idea must be innate. So Descartes has now attempted to prove God’s existence through his a...