Appearance and Reality (Week 1: Descartes)

You may feel sure that you are sitting reading these words now. But couldn’t even this basic belief be mistaken? Perhaps an evil demon is deliberately and cunningly manipulating your sensory input; perhaps you are really just wired up to a sophisticated virtual reality machine and what looks like a book in front of you is really nothing more than a series of electrical impulses sent directly into your brain. How do you even know that you have a body at all?

These questions and ideas might seem far-fetched, but they force you to think about the limits of what you know. They are the sorts of questions that René Descartes asked himself in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1642). (We are reading the whole of the First Meditation and part of the Second). He pushed skeptical doubts to the limit, but claimed to have discovered one kind of thought that was immune from all doubt.

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This week we will discuss the following short readings:

— "First Meditation: About the things we may doubt" by René Descartes (5 pages)
— "Second Meditation: On the nature of the human mind; and that it is easier to know than the body" (Excerpt) by René Descartes (3 pages)
— "Descartes" by Bernard Williams and Bryan Magee (16 pages)

These can be found on pages 306 to 329 of the collected volume Philosophy: Basic Readings (Second Edition), which can be viewed and downloaded at http://bit.ly/2APrMcz or purchase a copy at: https://www.amazon.ca/Philosophy-Basic-Readings-Nigel-Warburton/dp/0415337984.

Please read the essays in advance and we'll discuss them together.

(For some background on philosophical skepticism or the epistemological problems of perception, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/ and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For background on Descartes, often dubbed the father of modern philosophy, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/.)