ABSTRACT
The First Meditation called into ‘doubt’ all the deliverances of the senses, and especially what we learn from the senses concerning the existence of nature and our physical selves. It also raised questions about the certainty of mathematics and the reality of simple natures. The aim of the Second Meditation is to establish that we can know with certainty that we ourselves exist even without knowing that bodies exist. Our knowledge of ourselves as thinking beings is, Descartes holds, primary and non-sensory. In addition, Descartes argues that we have a non-sensory awareness of the nature of body itself, which is far superior to what we take to be ‘knowledge’ gained by direct sensory apprehension. Another important claim of the Second Meditation is that the knowledge of ourselves as thinking things is, like the knowledge of body derived from reason, ‘clear and distinct.’ I will argue later that this claim provides an important step in Descartes’s development of his argument for the independence of mind from body-an argument concluded only in the Sixth Meditation. In addition it implies what I will call the doctrine of the ‘epistemological transparency’ of thought or of the thinker: our awareness of our thought processes is immediate and unproblematic. Thus, thought lies outside the domain of scientific explanation. Unlike body, it is just what it seems, and there is nothing about it to explain. (As I will argue later, though, Descartes also holds some views that are in conflict-or at any rate in tension-with the doctrine of epistemological transparency of thought or mind.)
In this chapter I will be primarily concerned, first, with what is sometimes called Descartes’s ‘proof of his own existence,’ and second with the argument through which he tries to establish some fundamental propositions about the nature of body. My treatment of the first topic is, mainly, an attempt to explore and clarify certain aspects of the so-called cogito reasoning, for what I regard as their great intrinsic interest. While I will argue in some detail against certain other treatments of the subject, much of this criticism is relatively independent of the
