Essay about Mind and Senses

Submitted By stemina32
Words: 794
Pages: 4
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Masson Celestin
Professor Cathleen Muller
Philosophical perspectives
11/24/2014
Paper #2

Our perceptions are the product of our imagination. Perhaps this perception is ordered on something real and it certainly is not completely arbitrary. Only we do have no guarantee. The only universal and necessary knowledge we have, comes from what we perceive, we can feel, imagine, and overall think.
The thinking is first to any point of view, it is the power of all our actions and therefore know things that only know what they are in the relation of thought to itself. Not in the relation of thought to things we do not know what are the things independently of us. (rebuttal of Aristotle). How can we recognize outsides things? What faculty of knowledge is required for that?

Descartes shows that perceiving is not felt, and that the essence of the body does not lie in their sensible appearances, but in the material or in the scope. The knowledge of what the body does not come from the body, sensations, but of the spirit. senses inform us only of the existence of the object.
But the relation of thought to itself that is to say: What I perceive it is I, my power to collect my thoughts or that produces this perception. That my thoughts studies when studying a subject is thinking. Knowledge is therefore a report thought to itself.

In the start, “Let us now accordingly consider the objects that are commonly thought to be [the most easily, and likewise] the most distinctly known, viz, the bodies we touch and see” Descartes is talking here about the thesis of common senses. What we know the more distinctly is what our senses give us. The object with all of its sensibles qualities. Explaining to us the Empirist view, which is that knowledge originates from the senses. Then, he is taking a more pedagogic point of view, from the physical object (not concept). He comes to the conclusion that we think knowing something when we successfully tell the physical and sensible characteristics.

Descartes refutes the empiric view in a very simple way. He makes an experience with a piece of wax.When the wax melt, it loses and change its characteristics but we still can say it is the same piece of wax. What is questioned about this experience is that Descartes doesn’t prove that the wax is the same in its second melted state. Indeed, senses only gives some informations (taste, smell, touch, vision and hearing) but not information avec a link between the wax in the first and its second state. Which brings us to this problem: is sensibles characteristics necessary to the knowledge of something? To answer this problem we have to ask ourselves what missing thing gives us informations and not by what thing gives us informations. Indeed if we take example on sensible characteristics like a costume (The object hides under its looks, which are not necessary. We could be naked or not, it would still be ourselves).
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