Plato Vs. Descartes Essays - Thought, Ren Descartes, Epistemology

Plato Vs. Descartes Descartes vs. Plato In the field of philosophy there can be numerous answers to a general question, depending on a particular philosophers views on the subject. Often times an answer is left undetermined. In the broad sense of the word and also stated in the dictionary philosophy can be described as the pursuit of human knowledge and human values. There are many different people with many different theories of knowledge. Two of these people, also philosophers, in which this paper will go into depth about are Descartes and Plato. Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy and Platos The Republic are the topics that are going to be discussed in this paper. In Meditations, Descartes brings doubt to everything he believes because it is human nature to believe that which is false. He states that most of what he believes comes from the senses and that a lot of times those senses can be deceived. His conclusion of doubting everything is based on his example of a basket of apples. It goes as follows; you have a basket of apples but you fear that some apples have gone bad and you dont want them to rot the others, so you throw all the apples out of the basket. Now that the basket is empty you examine each apple carefully and return the good apples to the basket. This is what he does with his beliefs, he follows and keeps only those beliefs of which he is sure of. Our beliefs as a whole must be discarded and then each individual belief must be looked at carefully before we can accept it. We must only accept those beliefs we feel are good. Descartes does realize, though, that we cant throw every belief out because they are a part of us, unlike the apples. If the beliefs were not a part of us we would have no basis for recovering any of the discarded beliefs because we are unable to justify anything. He states that no belief based on sense-perception is free from doubt, it is possible that this life is all a dream and we are being deceived into thinking it is reality. Descartes also finds that anything that exists physically is false, even including his own body. The only things we should trust are those beliefs that can be held up to rational scrutiny. Thus Descartes doubts everything but himself, he feels himself is the only thing in this life which cannot be proven false. He states that if he had no knowledge of himself than nothing can be certain. If he himself can doubt than he must exist and in cannot be proven false. Another proof that he exists is that in order to be deceived one must be able to exist. Descartes states in his famous quote, I think, therefore I am. What was just explained above is Descartes first step to gaining knowledge, that is to build on what you know is certain and use yourself as the foundations. Now his second step he tries to show how we know bodies through reason and now through our senses. He uses a piece of wax to demonstrate this theory. A piece of wax place by a fire will in time change form and shape and thus lose all its specific properties, yet it is still known as wax. In order to understand what wax is you must be able to know it in all its forms and anticipate its changes. But Descartes argues that the shapes and forms that the wax could take are infinite. Thus, one can only know what an object is through understanding, rather than through sense-perception. In his third meditation Descartes discusses the topic of God. Me makes the argument that God exists, he makes two points with this argument. The first being that we have an idea of God and the second being that the only way to have an idea of God is if God exists. To have an the idea of God than we have the understanding of the infinite. We cannot understand the infinite through the finite, only through the infinite, thus God must also be the cause of the idea of God. By following