Philosophy Self-Study 2026, 07 (Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes)

Sosa's early chapters were the ones that convinced me the most, so I think it's only fair I at least take a look at Descartes, who provides the base for the entire argumentation. I found an English translation from Cambridge Press, edited by John Cottingham, which I'll be working from. Descartes' Meditations consist of six different essays, also called "Meditations" in the text, each of which essentially formulates one argument around epistemology. The first one is doubtlessly the most famous one of the six. In fact, I'm almost certain that the entirety of it is known to the vast majority of readers that have had a high school philosophy class. It contains the famous premise of ignoring all beliefs which can't be doubtlessly proved, and arriving at the cogito. I think there is a quaintness there, that is mostly due to the time it was written. These days, we have a lot of mechanisms declaring that they are real, even to our face, but clearly aren't. Stochastic parrots have broken our framework of everyday epistemology anyways, and so we can really only take this first essay's shortcomings in that regard with some grace. It functions okay as an argument, if only directed inward, but it is from there that things begin to fall apart a little bit. The second meditation is a structuring of knowledge, not unlike the way ancient Greek philosophers divided their world into objects and concepts. Descartes establishes a well of ideas that he could use to apply "pure mathematics", though which ideas really qualify for it remains a little questionable. I think within mathematics specifically, it makes sense to apply the method of working from axioms and reasoning to more complex (or often just shorter) statements. As soon as reasoning breaks out of it, so far, this breaks down catastrophically. We don't have an absolute model of physics, and graduating from the realm of pure ideas to anything more abstract, like which course of action is "correct" in a social situation, relies so heavily on the senses that any axiom that could be applied, would have to be emergent from a lifetime of sense experience, which had been abandoned in the first Meditations. The third meditations is arguably where Descartes should have stopped. He runs into the infinite regress problem several times here, and reasons that there is a god that acts as the origin of anything. I don't like it as an argument. Descartes reasons his way to an entity, because he is stuck. This, if anything, is a hypothesis, but packaged as it is, it's meant to function as a proof. The rest of the meditations are heavily contingent on the premise that god in this form exists. This is perhaps worst for meditation four, because it tries to explain the existence of untruths despite god, and comes up with a rather standard fare of human imperfection that must have been on purpose for the god. I'm sure this argument must have been made somewhere before, likely by some monk or similarly concerned. In the fifth and sixth meditations he addresses the epistemology of objects outside of oneself and god through an "intrinsic" concept of truths which is moderated by the things that exist, because god made them. I admit that I had trouble with even grasping the argument with this chapter, because the qualifiers for existence don't really make a lot of sense to me. It's likely that there are a lot more implications attached to existence and truth. I get the distinct sense that those two arae supposed to be implicitly coupled in the truths, which gives existence a virtue judgement. I know of some philosophical proofs that attach value to existence to the point where it alone leverage a proof for god's existence. I never thought that made a lot of sense, because beyond things being "nice to have", climate change, for example isn't "better" than unicorns, just because the latter don't exist. God is then directly responsible for both the real world of our sense perceptions and the ideas that we can form. It feels like a very controlled paradigm for existing, which to me feels a little bleak. I think the latter four meditations could probably use heavy modernizing, before being reapplied, and to Sosa's credit, he barely borrows from any of the meditations after the first. On the other hand, it's somewhat heartening to know that even the essential classics at the foundation of modern civilization are deeply, unignorably flawed.