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HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS Methodic Doubt (Zero-Based Epistemology) You may be familiar with a budget-building method called zero-based budgeting. Instead of carrying everything in your present budget forward into the next year and writing justifications only for the new things you wish to add, zero-based budgeting starts from zero. Every item must be justified. All the things you spent money on in the current year must be rejustified, along with any new expenditures you’d like to make next year. Descartes does something like this with his method of doubt. He is unwilling to assume anything in his mind to be true, so he casts it all out by doubting in a systematic or methodic manner. This is a kind of zero-based epistemology because he will allow nothing into his mind as certain knowledge unless and until he justifies it by deducing or reasoning its certainty. Once he deduces the Cogito and admits his existence as a certainty, he insists that every other item be similarly justified—God, the material world, even his own body doubt, he is doubting. If he is doubting, he is thinking and must therefore exist as a thinking thing: Even though there may be a deceiver of some sort, very powerful and very tricky, who bends all his efforts to keep me perpetually deceived, there can be no slightest doubt that I exist, since he deceives me; and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never make me be nothing as long as I think that I am something. Thus, after having thought well on this matter, and after examining all things with care, I must finally conclude and maintain that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time I pronounce it or conceive it in my mind.8 When the essence of this now famous proof was rendered in Latin, the translation of “I think, therefore I am” became “Cogito ergo sum.” As a result, this proof is known as the Cogito. With the Cogito, Descartes has finally arrived at certain knowledge, but it is unfortunately very limited knowledge. What Descartes can be sure of is only the contents of his own mind. In philosophy this is called solipsism, the belief that only minds and their contents exist. Even if Descartes can be sure he exists as a thinking thing, he still cannot trust his perceptions that he has a body and that there is a world outside his mind; nor can he be sure that the mathematical certainties he has are correct. In other words, he has reasoned himself into a very small box. Beyond Solipsism to Belief in a Material World To get out of this box, Descartes must prove to himself that a very powerful and very good God exists to serve as the guarantor that the certainties of mathematics are true and that Descartes’s perceptions are not hallucinations. Only a powerful yet good deity—a nondeceiving God—would assure Descartes that his perceptions of his own body and of the material world were accurate and matched reality. You may recall that Thomas Aquinas used the world to prove God in his cosmological proofs (the Prime Mover, the Cogito [KO ghi toe] the proof by which Descartes established his mental existence solipsism belief that only my mind exists and everything else is a perception of that mind When it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable. René Descartes HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS Methodic Doubt (Zero-Based Epistemology) You may be familiar with a budget-building method called zero-based budgeting. Instead of carrying everything in your present budget forward into the next year and writing justifications only for the new things you wish to add, zero-based budgeting starts from zero. Every item must be justified. All the things you spent money on in the current year must be rejustified, along with any new expenditures you’d like to make next year. Descartes does something like this with his method of doubt. He is unwilling to assume anything in his mind to be true, so he casts it all out by doubting in a systematic or methodic manner. This is a kind of zero-based epistemology because he will allow nothing into his mind as certain knowledge unless and until he justifies it by deducing or reasoning its certainty. Once he deduces the Cogito and admits his existence as a certainty, he insists that every other item be similarly justified—God, the material world, even his own body. Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. chapter 5: knowledge sources 233 First Cause, the Necessary Being). Paradoxically, Descartes must use God to prove the world, and to do so he must first define God into existence without being able to use any of Aquinas’s proofs. Whether or not he does this successfully is for you to judge. In his Meditations, Descartes used several proofs for the existence of God. The first is an ontological proof, similar to the one devised by Anselm in the eleventh century (see Chapter 4). Like Anselm, Descartes reasoned that, if I can conceive of a perfect God, then that perfect God must exist; otherwise, lacking existence, God would not have all the properties of perfection and would cease to be “perfect.” Ideas that are both clear and distinct are, for Descartes, the only ones on which a thinking person may rely. Because Descartes does indeed have in his mind a “clear and distinct” idea of a perfect God, he reasons that the subject of this idea must have a real existence: I find it manifest that we can no more separate the existence of God from his essence than we can separate from the essence of a triangle the fact that the size of its three angles equals two right angles, or from the idea of a mountain the idea of a valley. Thus it is no less self-contradictory to conceive of a God, a supremely perfect Being, who lacks existence—that is, who lacks some perfection—than it is to conceive of a mountain for which there is no valley.9 Another proof concludes that only God could be the source of Descartes’s idea of God, because any other source (like Descartes himself, for instance) would present the paradox of the lesser being the source of the