Abstract

This teaching resource introduces undergraduate students to the central argument of Descartes’s Second Meditation. René Descartes was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, he embarked on a kind of intellectual cleansing and reorientation. He explored a radical way that we might free ourselves from everything that distorts our thinking—such as preconceived opinions, prejudices, and the confused testimony of unreliable sources—and place our views about the world on a new, pure, and rock-solid foundation. Descartes splits his meditations up into six parts. In the First Meditation, he describes a once in a lifetime exercise of subjecting all his beliefs to intense doubt. In the Second Meditation, he discusses whether any belief could survive this exercise. This short article summarises and explains Descartes’ argument that purports to show that one special belief can serve as a stable foundation for the entire intellectual project of learning about the world.