Throughout his "First Meditation", Rene Descartes is worrying about the foundations of his personal beliefs. He fears that the beliefs he formatted in youth were based on false assumptions and consequently doubtful. To test his assumptions, Descartes tackles several intellectual problems that seem to bother him. Descartes formats his intellectual problems as deductive arguments in an attempt to rationally justify their validity. A deductive argument that is valid is based on the assumption that all of its premises are true. Premises are the supporting propositions, or claims, of an argument. Not all premises are necessarily true.
One of Descartes' chief premises is concerned with the existence of real things. He argues that anything imagined must be made up of something that exists in reality. Even something, "utterly fictitious and false," must, "at the very least," be fashioned from true colors (15). Descartes uses this form of reasoning to establish several abstract disciplines as being real.
"First Meditation" was not just written for Descartes to voice his concerns and aims, he also wrote it to achieve status as an intellectual thinker. His persuasive power in the text is unquestionably strong. His premises are replete with a great deal of evidence. Descartes essay is a piece held in high esteem because of its clarity, eloquence, and creativity. Yet its literary merit does not guarantee that it has logical strength. Descartes does provide evidence for his conclusions, but the truth behind them is sketchy. He manages to perplex in his rationalization of the existence of a "supremely good God" (16). Since Descartes has no visual proof of God he has no epistemic reason to support his beliefs. This calls into question the certainty Descartes has in his arguments. He is obviously psychologically certain, or personally convinced that his premises are true, because he stated his goal to, "establish anything firm and lasting in the...
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