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His aim is to offer an argument for the existence of God, based simply on what (after the first two Meditations) he knows with certainty.
Typology: Summaries
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“ I will now shut my eyes, block my ears, cut off all my senses. I will regard all my mental images of bodily things as empty, false and worthless .... I will ... examine myself more deeply, and try ... to know myself more intimately. I am a thing that thinks, i.e that doubts, affirms, denies, ... [etc]. This thing also ... has sensory perceptions; ... even if the objects of my sensory experience ... don’t exist outside me, still sensory perception ..., considered simply as mental events, certainly do occur in me. ”
I previously accepted as perfectly certain and evident many things ...—the earth, sky, stars, and everything else that I took in through the senses—but in those cases what I perceived clearly were merely the ideas or thoughts of those things that came into my mind .... But I used also to believe that my ideas came from things outside that resembled them in all respects. .... [This] was false; or anyway if it was true it was not thanks to the strength of my perceptions.
“ When ideas are considered solely in themselves and not taken to be connected to anything else, they can’t be false; for whether it is a goat that I am imagining or a chimera, either way it is true that I do imagine it. .... All that is left—the only kind of thought where I must watch out for mistakes—are judgments. And the mistake they most commonly involve is to judge that my ideas resemble things outside me. ’
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caused by things that exist outside my mind, and that my ideas “resemble them.”