I AM - therefore I think.

antiskeptic

Moses, in trying to figure out ways of declining God's job offer to go lead the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity asked God "but who shall I say sent me?"

God replied: "tell them... I AM has sent me to you". God describes himself in this primary way as an existing being. Once existing, his nature is as his nature is. This happens to be a thinking nature.

"I am therefore I think" would be God's order of events..


Could someone explain to me, why it is that Descartes arrived at the sequence: "I think therefore I am" rather than beginning with his existance and concluding "I exist therefore I think"

Seloth

antiskeptic wrote: »

Moses, in trying to figure out ways of declining God's job offer to go lead the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity asked God "but who shall I say sent me?"

God replied: "tell them... I AM has sent me to you". God describes himself in this primary way as an existing being. Once existing, his nature is as his nature is. This happens to be a thinking nature.

"I am therefore I think" would be God's order of events..


Could someone explain to me, why it is that Descartes arrived at the sequence: "I think therefore I am" rather than beginning with his existance and concluding "I exist therefore I think"

Because he was describe his own existance and thought,not everyone elses.

It's pretty simple to understand that by the way he phrased it"I think" as in he does "There fore I am" proving his own existance to himlself.Now by saying "I exist therefore I think" that is pretty much saying a cause and effect,Being the only reason he thinks is because he exists,if he were not to exist then e would not think.

They are two completly diffrent meanings

Finnbar01

I don't get that statement 'I think therefore I am'. It is not a genuine proposition of
thought. It asserts to prove the existence of an I; but it takes for granted the existence of this I when it says I think.

Cannibal Ox

I think you need to understand Descartes and the context he was working in. Descartes was an important mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He was deeply concerned with, and involved with, the scientific method. He died just after Newton was born, and his work on maths, and physics, was what Newton and Leibniz responded to, and critiqued.

Descartes wanted to take the scientific method, and mathematical proof, and apply it to philosophy. Descartes was interested in certainty. He wasn't satisfied with previous philosophers attempts at explaining the world because it didn't use the scientific method, and couldn't objectively prove the existence of the world.

So, he started by arguing that you can't trust the body. He argued that all of the senses, sight, smell, hearing, touch, are fallible, and cannot be relied on for objective knowledge. You can't take as a given that the I exists because we can touch, see, hear, and smell, other bodies, because all of those senses are fallible.

He then introduces the demon. He argues that we have dreams where the dream seems absolutely real, and argues that we could imagine the entire world as being an illusion, as being the work of a wicked demon. Our perception of the world cannot be relied on because our perception can be fallible. We can doubt our perception, and because we can doubt it, it can't be the source of objective knowledge or proof.

This puts him in a tricky position. If you can't rely on the body as a source of knowledge, because the senses are fallible, and you can't rely on perception, because the world could be an illusion, what can you rely on to objectively prove the existence of the world and the I?

As long as you agree with all of the previous steps, his solution is really quite brilliant. He says I doubt. I doubt my senses. I doubt my perception. I doubt the objectivity of the world. All of these things could be false, but, I doubt, and if I doubt these things, I must exist. I think, therefore I am.

Descartes was concerned with constructing a system that could be relied on to produce objective knowledge of the real. To do that he needed to discover a foundation, a root, of objective knowledge within the I. He couldn't find it in the body or perception, but he could find it in the I, and the I's ability to doubt and to think.

This had a number of consequences. Descartes makes a distinction between the body and the mind, a dualism, where the body cannot be relied on for knowledge, and the mind is seen as the source of truth. Descartes locates true knowledge within, where as thinkers in the empiricst tradition, starting with Locke and moving through Berkley and Hume, argued that you can find knowledge out there in the world.

Descartes, Lebiniz, and Spinoza, were rationalists, while Locke, Berkley and Hume, were empiricists. This was the great divide in philosophy up until, maybe, Kant. You could argue that Kant's work was a response to the empiricist and rationalist divide, and it was an attempt to move past that divide, and offer a new way of thinking.

By the 20th century Descartes work was largely out of favour. Freud's work critiques Descartes dualism by showing how the body can be relied on for sources of knowledge that the mind cannot produce. Gilbert Ryle, writing in the analytic tradition and a friend of Wittgenstein, critiqued Descartes work and labeled it as a ghost in the machine where the physical and mental take place simultaneously, but without any seeming connection (I think!). In the continental tradition, people like Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault would be very critical generally of Descartes and the tradition that followed him for a whole variety of reasons. Heidegger's work on Being might be an interesting contrast to Descartes, but I'm still trying to get my head around that stuff so I'm not sure how.

Finnbar01

That was an interesting post but if we say the body is fallible then can we not also say the mind is fallible as well?

Cannibal Ox

Finnbar01 wrote: »

That was an interesting post but if we say the body is fallible then can we not also say the mind is fallible as well?

Yes (the part about the dream and the demon), but, in Descartes method, we know that the I exists. By finding/discovering something that is absolutely certain, and that is undoubtable, Descartes finds in the I something from which all philosophical thinking can proceed from. You could view Descartes, and all philosophers really, as creating a method through asking these kinds of questions, which can then be used to ask more questions.

So Descartes argument to that question might run along the lines of, we can evaluate the fallibility of the mind from the position of absolute certainty in knowing that I exist because I think. If we didn't have the absolute certainty of I existing because I think, we would have no way of evaluating the fallibility of the mind. We'd descend into relativism because we would have no absolute to evaluate questions with.

Almost all philosophy 'finds' a position like this, where it can safely evaluate questions from. By having that base, what's often a set of assumptions about the most basic questions of life, knowledge and perception, you can proceed to questions around ethics or forms of government in such a way that you can evaluate them on the basis of those basic questions.

For example, in terms of ethics, we can only know what the 'good life' is if we first know what good and life are, and to know what good and life are, we have to work out how we can even know what good and life are, and to know how we work that out, we have to work out how we know. Once we know how we know, we can proceed to questions like good and life, and like what the good life is. Descartes method gives us a way of knowing how we know, and from there, we can ask lots of other questions.

EDIT: I meant to say in the last post there are interesting questions about Descartes and gender. The split between mind and body mirrors a split between men and women, where men are seen as the mind, and women as the body. This argument runs that women were associated with the body, and because Descartes, and the Cartesian tradition, subjugates the body to the mind, it reflects, and influences, the subjection of women, and women's knowledge and intellectual capability to men.

There's a test you can do if you have a room full of men and women. Ask everyone to stick their finger out, and then ask them to point to themselves. I'd bet that the vast majority of men point to their head, while the majority of women point to their chest. You could argue that is just how it is, or you could think about in terms of Descartes distinction between mind and body, and the association of men to mind and women to body.

philologos

antiskeptic: He arrives at the conclusion from reasoning through the First Meditation to a position where the senses are uncertain in reliability. He hinges on the point that he convinced himself, that nothing can exist in the Second Meditation. He notes that there may be an evil deceiver, which may have put this thought into his mind, but still thinks that there must be an I in order to be deceived.

He works from this position, to find a firm and immovable point by which he can begin to re-establish his former certainty.

How well he actually does this is really up for debate, but he sure makes a stab at it anyway!

He came from the position I think therefore I am rather than I exist therefore I think (more Augustinian) because he had doubted that the body could even exist, and that anything physical could exist. The point of Descartes coming to I think therefore I am, was crucial, as it was what was needed to establish that he did exist and was at the very least a thinking thing.

The point he is trying to demonstrate is the opposite of what the Biblical text is putting across. He needs to show that he exists, before he can argue that everything else exists as it does. He had thrown out all the information that he may have been deceived by to try and rationally put it all back together.

Valmont

I tend to subscribe to the idea of I am, therefore I'll think. I just don't see how anyone can reasonably deny that we are all humans on earth. I take that to be an objective reality and find Descartes' philosophy, in these times, to be overly indulgent.

philologos

Valmont - I find that one issue with Descartes leap in the Second Meditation is that he is meant to have done away with all that he has learned from the senses, and all that he has learned from youth.

Yet, in saying "I think therefore I am". One is assuming a sequence of cause and effect exists. I.E - Because there is thought, there must of necessity be a thinker. Hume was another philosopher who brought scepticism on the cause and effect relationship.

If one has genuinely doubted all things of the senses and all things one has learned from birth, one must also doubt the cause and effect relationship. Something which Descartes did not do.

It might be reasonable to say that if we think we must be human, but that isn't the point of what Descartes is trying to do. He's trying to find a firm immovable point, from which all reality can be reconstructed. I'd say that the point that he has found isn't all that firm.

Morbert

Descartes cannot be certain of his existence, as "I doubt" is an assumption without proof.

David Matthew

Poor old Descartes has been ripped apart for centuries - thanks to Cannibal Ox for pointing out the paradigm in which he was engulfed.

And I mean engulfed - it's no accident that an omnipotent deity served as a theoretical bedrock for his existence. Take that away, and Descartes might have been fearing for more than just his soul. Evil demons acting on behalf of the Lord might just have rapped on his laboratory door, and begun a little inquiry of their own...

It's interesting that we take Descartes' historical existence as a given (and I don't mean to say we shouldn't!), in a thread that offers up reasons as to why Descartes himself couldn't be sure of it. I doubt is indeed an assumption without proof, good point Morbert.

But with such a tough criterion for proof in place, what can prove proof itself?