PHILOS 25B Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Hair Loss, Aristotle
Document Summary
Recap: end of meditation ii, descartes realized all he could know for certain was the existence of his disembodied self, descartes classified ideas based on where they seem to come from. We don"t have good reason to believe our apparently adventitious ideas are actually caused by outside objects that resemble the ideas: this is different from the skepticism of the evil-genius and dream hypotheses. Here descartes is saying not simply that we should have doubt, but that we have no good reason for our beliefs. Veil of perception: this is the view that there is a metaphorical veil that separates our inner self from what"s going on outside of ourselves, we can"t just say based on our perceptions that an object exists. We have to make assumptions: it"s as though our ideas constitute a veil between our understanding and the outside world.
