Letter to Rene Descartes

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

René Descartes
February 18, 2010
Page

René Descartes

French Philosopher

123 Fake St.

Paris, France

Dear Mr. Descartes:

I am writing to you today in response to your Meditations on First Philosophy: First Meditation. First and foremost, I wish to applaud you on your revolutionary writing and the subtlety with which you seduce the Aristotelians away from their beliefs. However, upon analyzing your text, I was faced with some discrepancies which I wish to share with you.

Firstly, the word “deceive” implies misleading by intent, thus stating that our senses deceive us would lead one to believe that our senses have a mind of their own and intentionally plan to give us misinformation. Fortunately, this is not the case as our senses are nothing more than sensory devices designed to give us information about the physical world; they do not decide that what we see, hear, feel, or smell is what it is, but rather relay the sense experience to our brain which then processes the information and comes up with the conclusion of what that object is by corresponding the idea of that object with the sense experience. Thus our senses do nothing more than relay the information about the physical world to us and so long as they are not faulty, they will be able to give us an accurate set of information.

The fact that we occasionally make the wrong judgment about what is does not mean that it is due to the deception of our senses. As you mention in one of your examples about seeing the bent stick in water, it was not your senses that gave you the wrong information; they simply relayed data about how the stick looked from where you were standing. If anything, what deceived you was the water and even then, water does not have a mind of its own and therefore could not have deceived you. It is safe to conclude that a fully ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

Secondly, from your Fourth Meditation, your belief in God is apparent and thus it confuses me when you begin to question your senses. God reveals Himself to us through his creation and not believing in His creation means not believing in God. Your senses were created by God Himself and if you were to doubt the validity of these senses, you would be doubting God.

Finally, I must emphasize the importance of our senses because without them we would not be able to function properly as human beings. They allow us to fully grasp the physical world, and most importantly, they allow us to make judgments. The very basic of the acts of intellect and the one that comes before any other is simple apprehension, an act performed with the aid of our senses. Consequently, any judgment or reasoning we make will be derived from this apprehension; without apprehension, we would be left unable to make any judgments.

I have shared with you what I felt were some discrepancies with some of your ideas. Please note that throughout my letter, I was completely objective and in no point did I pass a subjective opinion; all I did was try and point out some of the logical conflicts of your First Meditation.

I will be looking forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Amirreza Abdolmaleki