René Descartes - Meditation #4 - The Problem of Error

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This is a lecture video about the fourth Meditation on First Philosophy by the French, 17th century, philosopher Rene Descartes. This meditation focuses on the problem of error, which is analogous to the better-known problem of evil. The problem is that in meditation #3 Descartes takes himself to have proven that God exists. But if God is all-good, then it seems impossible that God would have created Descartes in such a way that allow Descartes to come to false beliefs. Descartes claims to solve this problem by distinguishing between the faculty of knowledge or understanding or intellect, on the one hand, and the faculty of choice or freedom of the will, on the other.

Here are the videos about the previous meditations.

[lanierwexford]

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[alexavaneysan]

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[rahulk]

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[anag]

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[brendanward]

Another great lecture. The more I learn about the philosophy of Descartes, the less I respect him as a thinker. He strikes me as a dishonest thinker who is only interested in demonstrating that all his beliefs were actually the right ones to begin with. He doubts everything, then magically recovers everything and concludes: "Hey, I was right all along."

[Zyphosify]

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[battlefieldcustoms]

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[Aknorian]

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[ixthhydro]

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[Efapasonofking]

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[kensey]

Descartes: I can't be certain I have hands.

Also Descartes: I am certain that God is perfectly good.

[brokenrecord]

As a scientist (which I am), my philosophy is based in the scientific method, which relies much more heavily on the knowledge side of this equation, as if with perfect knowledge (or enough) that judgement/choice/will is not really a factor any more, i.e.,  once you truly understand something, you will have no choice, but to believe it. --- --- The problem (with our brains?) is that we neither attain the requisite knowledge nor realize that we are making a choice (to believe what we don't understand) so much so that we have elevated it to a virtue (faith).