all right so uh I'm gonna talk a little bit about Descartes now a little background introductory information and then uh the first meditation so that's what this video will be um you have as your first little bits to read of this text What's called the dedication and the preface and what's really important to note or what's important to note as readers here is the change in tone between the dedication and the preface and the uh addressee who he's talking to so in the dedication he's talking to the priests at the servo so the sabon University of Paris a very important intellectual Center of French life then and now and he's talking to the Priestly intelligencia there so the uh top university priests as it were and here you might notice that his tone is different he wants approval for what he's doing if he were to be ungenerous you might even say that he's groveling a bit to them you know like this work and so on and so forth and if you don't like it I can make changes so on um and then in the preface he's a little bit more confident he's addressing all of us he's addressing people who he's had some sort of intellectual polemics with in the past that is people who've criticized his work and so on and so the tone changes but what's important for you all to know before delving into the meditations or at least if you have already before thinking much more about them is the context of this so if you know a little history you know that for a long time the Catholic church is the uh big Authority throughout your many parts of Europe and for a time now but now I mean roughly Descartes time now the church is kind of the power of the church it's political power I mean it's legitimacy in terms of the influence it holds over people's lives is under threat from sort of two sides on the one side you have the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther you know the Theses he nails to the wall um the church the door of the church and you know if you aren't well educated at this time you live in Europe the church is the political power The Authority um you're a devout Catholic because there's nothing but the Catholic Church really I mean there's the Orthodox but for let's just stick with salsism for here um and you want to know what God Said or what's been written in the Bible the only way you can do that is by listening to or talking to a priest because the chances are if you aren't well educated as many people are not you don't speak Latin and you don't read Latin you don't write Latin and the Bible is written in Latin and so when Martin Luther starts to challenge the authority of the Catholic church this insistence upon mediation by the Priestly class so the priest is mediating the priests are mediating the relationship between um the body of the church and God uh Martin Luther says this isn't good more or less and he translates something very important if you don't know this he translates the Bible from Latin into German and the Luther Bible is still a important historical document um people still read it you can buy them and especially in Germany you can find them in any bookstore [Music] so that's one thing the other thing is that roughly speaking you know there are developments from the Renaissance onward uh in in Science and Mathematics that don't jive with the teachings of the church right the the the developments in science broadly speaking include math here um are sort of outside of the general theological framework right you see Galileo wasn't very well accepted for the things that he said and there's lots of stuff going on like that we have as one response to the Reformation you have the this horrible event called the Spanish Inquisition so it's not a good time to be considered a heretic you want you want the support of the church especially if you're an intellectual in France at the time and so Descartes is looking for the approval of the priest at the serbone that's very important why well because Descartes is in the first order a mathematician um those people who do geometry may have heard Cartesian plane before also he has things named after him um he makes Innovations with algebra and geometry so that's what he is maybe we say in the first order um in terms of his primary vocation and secondarily as many people are sort of a what we call Renaissance men not making distinctions between all these different fields today they're very specialized he's also a bit of a natural scientist right a physicist um and he's delving in all sorts of Sciences so a mathematician in the first order a scientist in the second order and it's only in the third order that he's a philosopher and yet we know him as a philosopher which is pretty strange you don't generally find in a physics Class A text written by Descartes at this point um physics has long since moved on but philosophy hasn't why is that um it's something we're thinking about we still live in a world in the west especially very much under the influence of Descartes place in the history of Western philosophy and especially what comes up in meditation number two um but um in any case one way to look at this is that what Descartes is doing is he's looking to justify his vocation vocation vocations as a mathematician and as a scientist in the eyes of the church he's looking to do because I think he's seeking approval for what he's doing he wants what he's doing in in these fields to jive with the church he wants the church's Theology and politics to come together with the um the direction of science at the time and so I don't want to say that this is the only reason that he's a philosopher but you you might want to suggest that one of the reasons he dons the Philosopher's cap here is in order to do this and so he'll tell us here um somewhere in the preface or the dedication um that he sets out uh his goal is to prove the existence of God and the soul um of course he's interested in the approval of the church so he's going to want to prove the existence of God but why the existence of the Soul well like Plato what's going on in the Cartesian meditations is the attempt to articulate a metaphysics so a philosophical system that can explain the fundamental structures of reality and we'll get the two sort of fundamental elements of reality for Descartes in the second meditation but for now it's just worth knowing that he's elaborating a metaphysics here in these meditations and if he can prove the existence of the soul and at the same time Root the production of mathematical and scientific knowledge in the soul he can then justify what he's doing in the eyes of the church because of course Catholic Church believes that human beings have souls so if you can prove the soul and ground found root mathematics and science in the soul in the human soul this is where mathematical knowledge comes from this is where scientific knowledge comes from it comes from the soul or some faculty of the Soul um then he's uh achieved what he set out to do so that's what's going on before the meditation starts then we get the first meditation right yeah we're in the first meditation might as well hop in um and where we start is with Descartes telling us that well he always sort of knew that there was something wrong with the body of knowledge that he prescribed to and that he would eventually have to tear everything down and start anew and what better time than when you're hanging out in your living room by the fire and we should note that Descartes is a guy who is taking part in a sort of leisurely activity here he's he's sitting by the fireplace thinking um that's the setting for the meditations right and you get that he refers um at the bottom of this page which is Page 13. um that I am now here sitting by the fire wrapped in a warm winter gown handling this paper oh I don't know what time of year it is that you're going to be listening to this video but I hope that you're comfortable as comfortable as Descartes seems to have been um so he's going to tear everything down but he's not despite the fact that he seems to have time to do leisurely philosophizing in his living room he's not going to take each bit of knowledge that he has and disprove them all one by one he figures that if he goes straight to the root straight to what what are the foundations of his present knowledge or what are the foundations of the body of knowledge that is hitherto um been his Ben Society um if you go to the root you don't have to worry about dealing with all the particular minutia it's like uh it's like when uh your friends or your family want to play Jingo and I hope everyone's played Jenga if you haven't you should uh fun little game and what happens what does the person who never wanted to play anyways do who wants to get the game over fast if they're not being a good sport they start taking the blocks from the bottom right so if you if you attack the foundations of knowledge everything will come crumbling with it and so the first foundational building block we get sort of two here is uh the senses or sense perception or perception so very much like Plato uh Descartes says that or thinks that we can't root knowledge and perception and he doesn't give very many examples you know we only get a paragraph or two but you could think about it um you could pause the video and think about different ways in which your senses have deceived you you know this is normally I would spend you know 10 minutes here trying to get students in a classroom setting to come up with various examples that's a good way to figure out whether or not you buy the method that he's going with here but so I'll give one example which is standing at one end of a long hallway right if you've ever stood at one end of a long hallway the hallway looks like it's getting more and more narrow but if you ask someone at the other end to measure things or you just simply walk down the hallway you'll see that your vision was deceiving you so Descartes says that our senses deceive us and if our sense is deceive us then we can doubt any knowledge which comes from our senses and he does say here that um where is he certainly this is at the bottom of page 13. certainly up to now I have accepted as fully true uh what I have accepted as fully true I have learned either from or by means of the senses so he's given the senses a lot of agency here in terms of his knowledge or previous knowledge and the senses can deceive us thereby we can doubt this knowledge this is the method of the first meditation right doubt we can doubt and doubt um when we have doubts we don't have solid foundations for knowledge right so um that's the first building block the sense is very much like Plato who says anything that comes from sense perception is merely opinion um the Mind Playing Tricks on us the sense is Playing Tricks on us the second bit here the second sort of building block um is The Faculty of imaginations as the first faculty the senses the second faculty The Faculty of imagination and Descartes goes into dreams here that's um seems to be what he most immediately Associates the imagination with um and again pause the video for a second think about it um have you ever had dreams that um okay make a question the line between the waking world and the sleeping World especially those dreams where you wake up in the dream and you think you've woken up but you're still dreaming things like this just see do you think that Descartes reasoning here is sound um do dreams if dreams belong to the faculty of imagination um do dreams cause us to doubt whether or not um knowledge that comes from the imagination is something that we can found a metaphors example he says no um and so dreams seem real they're not real but they are sometimes we think that dreams are made up of real things right people we know um even if there's a person we never saw before in our dream we might think that they're a mishmash of all different features that we know just from being out in the world we see different kinds of people all the time we could imagine up um all different sorts of people and this is kind of where he's at at the bottom of page 14 sort of in the middle here he says for the fact is that when painters desire to represent sirens and little seders with utterly un utterly unfamiliar shapes they cannot devise together new Natures for them but simply combine parts from different animals so a siren depending on the kind of sirens I don't know I think they're usually like a woman a human female with some bird stuff they're associated with the sea so maybe some sea stuff um a Seder like pan if you know anything about Greek mythology goat bottom human top um so composite things dreams are sometimes not not making a definitive statement on dreams here but some people conceive of dreams as composite things and my neighbors doing laundry right now I apologize if you can not hear the doors shutting Apartments renting that kind of life so composite things the imagination anything that we can imagine we can imagine all sorts of things that aren't real but we do so um as Composites as mixtures of things that we know in some sense and whether consciously subconsciously or otherwise and this reference to composite objects serves two two roles here um in the first sense he is able to extract extrapolate this argument that he's making he's appealing to dreams he's appealing to um fantasy beasts and all sorts of things you know um and he extrapolates this all the way to certain types of science so uh the second full paragraph from this on page 15. from all this perhaps we may safely conclude that physics astronomy medicine and all the other disciplines which involve the study of composite things are indeed doubtful so again the imagination is a building block and uh once you start to question this you find that what's going on with the imagination well the imagination is our ability to conceive of things by the production of Composites taking little building blocks and so on and so forth and so that's not not only should we be aware of you know science fiction fantasy mythology and dreams but actually there are there are um more well-regarded forms of knowledge like these sciences that he names again he chooses physics astronomy medicine um that also get called into question because in some sense these things must be based in our faculty of imagination okay so that's the first thing that he does by that's the first purpose that referring to composite serves here the second is that Composites are made of something they must be made up of something they must be made if they're made up of something perhaps there's something um which I can't doubt um the building blocks of Composites and uh how do I want to say this well he lands on arithmetic in Geometry he says here at the bottom of the same paragraph composite things care a little whether they exist in it contains something certain and indubitable something which can't be doubted for whether I am waking or sleeping two plus three equals five and a square has no more than four sides um so already I mean we're only what hardly two full Pages two and a half pages into the text and he's torn down the foundations of everything he's known before but he's found some bricks uh that he thinks were worth keeping and then we have this borderline I don't want to say it's bizarre it's striking the next paragraph however there is a certain opinion long fixed in my mind that there is a God I want you to pause and think about what he's doing here why has he introduced God at this point does he want to make some connection between the existence of God and the existence of things which can't be called into doubt like arithmetic um I can't say for sure but there's certainly something interesting rhetorically going on here and then after that we just sort of have him going back and forth well he says God is uh supremely good and certainly doesn't will it that I be deceived um so it's not God who's tricking me when the senses trick me or when my imagination tricks me or when my imagination conceives the things that couldn't possibly be real God's not doing that because God is supremely good however um I cannot doubt that he does permit it that's at the bottom of page 15. and over the next like two or three paragraphs what you see him saying is that God exists um God is not the one who's causing me to doubt um and even though God is benevolent and is not tricking me it still seems everything that I've done is still Justified doubting seems good like let's see I have a quote here um at the top of well top paragraph 16 in the middle to all these arguments indeed I have no answer but at length I am forced to admit that there is nothing of all those things I once thought true of which it is not legitimate to doubt so it remains legitimate to doubt um and then he sort of introduces this weird figure of a great this Great Deceiver I call it sometimes I will therefore suppose that God uh will that not God who is perfectly good in the source of truth but some evil spirit supremely powerful and cunning has devoted all his efforts to deceiving um and that's kind of where the meditation ends the meditation ends with uh pretty much only doubt I will consider myself as having no hands no eyes no flesh no blood no senses um and so on and so forth so he's doubted everything away except for God and maybe arithmetic in Geometry it's not entirely clear whether he's moved Beyond those um or whether or not they seem somewhat less doubtful um one little trick that's maybe also implicit here is that if he's able to be deceived by this great evil spirit then he could also be deceived about his doubt um that's one thing that might be implied here but in any case we're left with just a floating mind doubting something which Descartes is sort of known for so uh I'll leave it at that that's the first meditation context um and context so um go back through read um see if there's any anything's cleared up I know that the the style can be a little bit difficult if you're not used to reading these older texts that are text in Translation obviously this was written in lab um yeah think about some of the things I said and then read meditation too I'll be back uh I'll be back to talk about the fundamental building blocks of reality in meditation two and a little bit about why we still live in a Cartesian world what that means whether or not we can or should get out of it take care