René Descartes
René Descartes was the 17th-century French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who wrote Meditations on First Philosophy to explain how science can be based on a set of purely rational principles. Starting from the principle that…
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The Meditator
The Meditator is Descartes’s alter ego and the narrator of Meditations. At the beginning of the book, the Meditator points out that he used to take many beliefs for granted before realizing that…
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God
One of the central issues in Meditations is the existence of God, whom Descartes describes—in line with Catholic doctrine—as the infinite, perfect, eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful being who created humans and the universe. Descartes dedicates Meditation…
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The Evil Demon
In a famous thought experiment that philosophers have studied closely for centuries, the Meditator sorts his certain beliefs from his uncertain ones by imagining that an evil demon is controlling his mind and planting all…
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