Descartes Belief

Abstract:

I have decided to compile some of what I will be taking away with me from this PHIL 409.02 experience. I apologize if I have not connected the dots of my chosen topic very well. Most of the suggested readings were quite a challenge for me, from print size to content that offered a mental workout. All in all, the experience was a valuable one. Being part of the Theory Knowledge group the research introduced me to many philosophers. The two that stands out the most are Descartes and Spinoza. I have decided to look at their knowledge of and belief in God.

Introduction:

One of the pressing questions in seventeenth century philosophy, and perhaps the most celebrated legacy of Descartes's dualism, is the problem of how two radically different substances such as mind and body enter into a union in a human being and cause effects in each other. How can the extended body causally engage the unextended mind, which is incapable of contact or motion, and "move" it, that is, cause mental effects such as pains, sensations and perceptions. Spinoza, in effect, denies that the human being is a union of two substances. The human mind and the human body are two different expressions -- under Thought and under Extension -- of one and the same thing: the person. And because there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body, the so-called mind-body problem does not, technically speaking, arise.

Descartes, in his Meditations, argues that absolute certainty is needed in order to justify a belief. He states that all justified beliefs must be based upon at least one piece of Ð''unshakeable' foundational knowledge and provides "I think therefore I am" as his first piece of foundational knowledge. (Meditations, 23)