Descartes Surprise Ending in Discourse on Method

In one of the most influential books in the history of Western philosophy, Rene Descartes outlines a method mental reasoning, which he applies to a wide variety of fields and intellectual endeavors. For the first few books of Discourse on the Method, Descartes outlines first how the method came about as he was a pupil at school and had the realization that he was not actually learning anything important. He was therefore motivated to discover what truly constituted learning, knowledge, and truth. The philosopher can do this by doubting everything first. By doubting, he can use reason to discern what is real from unreal. Doubting is the focus of Book Two of Discourse on the Method. The method that Descartes applies to fields like geometry, which the author points out in Book Two. His doubting is more personal in Book Three. The surprise ending to Discourse on the Method comes when suddenly Descartes is no longer doubting something. He spends so much time in the first three books on doubting information, and letting go of his beliefs, that when he launches into his cogito ergo sum assertion, it comes to the reader as a great surprise. The surprise ending is that Descartes finds the first thing he cannot doubt, which is the fact that he exists. His existence is something that cannot be doubted, or else it would create a metaphysical conundrum: it is not possible to even think about doubting without first existing. The smallest thought cannot come from nothingness, and so,Show MoreRelatedAnalyzing the Surprise Ending in Descartes Discourse on the Method and the Meditations1051 Words   |  4 PagesSurprise Ending in Descartes In the book Discourses on the Method and the Meditations, author Rene Descartes famously questions the existence of humanity. His most famous quotation, the one for whom he is most remembered is I think therefore I am (Descartes 11). According to this idea, so long as a being has the ability to think then they existed. Animals have brains and therefore they must exist. In order to truly, exist, to be a thinking entity, a person or organism must utilize the abilityRead MoreDescartes and the Existence of God751 Words   |  3 Pagesï » ¿Descartes: The existence of God Over the course of his treatise Discourse on the Method, the philosopher Rene Descartes attempts to refute radical skepticism, or the idea that we can know nothing with the mind, because what we consider reality may simply be a delusion or a dream. Descartes begins, however, by taking a posture of doubting everything, and then attempting to discern what could be known for certain. Rather than attempting to affirm his existence, I thought that a procedure exactlyRead MoreAnalysis of Descartes Argument788 Words   |  3 Pageswords) which analyzes the surprise ending of the reading selection.? Reading selection from Descartes Discourse on the Method (Part IV). Descartes begins with the problem of being able to prove his own existence but ends up with an argument proving the existence of God. Read more about the Discourse on the Method located at HYPERLINK http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/descdisc.pdf http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/descdisc.pdf. In his Discourse on the Method, Descartes essentially asked hisRead MoreMetz Film Language a Semiotics of the Cinema PDF100902 Words   |  316 Pagestranslate Greimas s concept of actant is misleading and actant is usually kept (see Ducrà ´t and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, p. 224), and discours image when translated as image discourse is not very clear, since it is referring to film, which is made up of images. The following rough spots occur only once each: Unusual (p. 5) translates weakly insolite, which has also the connotation of strange, disquieting, surprising, unexpectedRead MoreLogical Reasoning189930 Words   |  760 Pages.......................................................................... 169 Unintended Innuendo ....................................................................................................................... 172 Disobeying Rules of Discourse......................................................................................................... 173 Not Sticking to the Issue and Not Treating It Fairly ..................................................................... 174 Not Accepting