In light of the above passage, explicate in detail the Trademark Argument of Descartes proving the existence of God.

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Rajesh Mendonca

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        Assignment no 7

"I understand by the name 'God' a certain substance that is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent and supremely powerful and that created me along with everything else that exists."

(Descartes Pg 30 Para: 45)

In light of the above passage, explicate in detail the Trademark Argument of Descartes proving the existence of God.

Answer:-Descartes third meditation illustrates about the existence of god. “I must examine whether there is a God, and, if there is, whether he can be a deceiver. For if I do not know this, it seems that I can never be quite certain about anything else” (Descartes Pg 25 Para: 36). According to Descartes, the knowledge of God's existence can be viewed as the foundation of, and more certain than all knowledge, other than immediate self-knowledge. Descartes divides his   third meditation into two parts. The first part consists of the practical proposal about clear and distinct ideas and the second part concludes with the existence of god.

  1. Clear and Distinct Ideas

According to Descartes, ideas seem to be of three possible types:

  • Innate Ideas: - Descartes believed that these come within us.” Innate Ideas include my understanding of what a thing is and what a thought is.” Innate ideas, according to Descartes, result from our own nature.
  • Adventitious Ideas:-Descartes believed that these originate from our sense experiences, believing in things etc.
  • Ideas of something we haven’t seen: - Descartes believed that these kinds of ideas are invented in our minds.
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Descartes believed that these ideas need not correspond to anything real. This can be illustrated with an example: The cause of X must contain at least as much reality as X.If X contained nothing that was  not in the cause, then something would have been created out of nothing ,which is absurd. This same example Descartes states could be applied to ideas. Our ideas of trees, unicorns, sun etc are all caused by us, since these ideas do not have greater reality than what we have. In other words, we could have the idea of trees and unicorns, even if ...

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