Study Questions on Descartes’ Meditations

1. Give a one- or two-sentence overview of each of the meditations.

2. What does heuristic mean?

3. Why is Descartes’ heuristic method important to this philosophical work? Why might we even say that the method embodies or expresses an important element of Descartes’ philosophy?

4. List some of the words in your toolkit. Are you putting in any words from Aristotle?

5. How can you characterize Descartes’ doubt? What does it mean to say that Descartes’ method is a method of doubt?

6. What’s the problem with trying to destroy all past beliefs?

7. Why does Descartes use the dream hypothesis and the “evil genius” hypothesis?

8. What is one of the most important foundations of Descartes’ past belief?

9. Why does Descartes try to be even more skeptical than the skeptics?

10, What is the status of the past in Descartes’ Meditations?

11. At the beginning of Meditation #2, the Meditator renews his commitment to doubt. What do you think of his comparison with a man in a whirlpool?

12. Since in Meditation #2 (and for some time to come), Descartes’ Meditator does not have a body, he has to discard all activities or processes concerned with the body. What does he discover that he is?

13. What does the example of the wax prove?

14. What does Descartes say imagining is?

15. Why does Descartes shut his eyes and stop up his ears at the beginning of Meditation #3?

16. What is the difference between “objective reality” and “formal reality”?

17. What is a “formal” cause? an “eminent” cause?

18, Descartes says that his own existence and his having the idea of God “demonstrates most evidently that God too exists” (80). Can you retrace his argument so far to explain why he can say that this is so?.

Use “Reading closely”(creating a study page for Meditation #3) to make up and answer further questions on Meditation #3.

19. Descartes claims that “All we clearly and distinctly perceive is true” (55; synopsis). And furthermore, if he uses his “faculty for judgment” right, he can’t make a mistake! What problem immediately arises?

20. How does Descartes account for error?

21. What can Descartes do to keep from making mistakes?

22. What does “ontological” mean?

23. At the beginning of Meditation #5, Descartes tells us he wants to move on to questions about “material things.” Instead of going to that question immediately, however, Descartes starts with something else. What is this something else? And what does Descartes have to say about it?

24. What does the example of the triangle show?

25. What’s the salient difference between God and a triangle or between God and a mountain/valley?

26. Does Descartes have a body at the beginning of Meditation #6?

27. Review and explain Descartes’ distinction between thinking and imagining.

28. What is Descartes’ essence? Does it include imagining?

29, On p. 94, Descartes sets up a general review. What does he say he’s going to do?

30. How does Descartes characterize the difference between mind and body?

31. Can Descartes understand himself without taking “the faculties of imagining and sensing into account” (96)?

32. Why is an extended thing necessary for the Meditator’s understanding of sensing, imagining, moving from one place to another, etc. (96)?

3. What does Descartes mean when he says “And consequently corporeal things exist. Nevertheless, perhaps not all bodies exist exactly as I grasp them by sense, since this sensory grasp is in many cases very obscure and confused” (97)?

34. Why does Descartes keep considering what nature teaches him?

35. Why does Descartes say he can set aside the “hyperbolic doubts of the last few days” (101)?

36. What problem remains?

Three discussion questions:

1. Why do you trust your senses? What do you trust your sense for?

2. Why do you think Descartes wants to [has to] proves God’s existence?

3. Why does Descartes call his philosophical work a meditation?