PHL100Y1 Lecture Notes - Pepperoni, Causality, Pineal Gland
Document Summary
[1] the sixth meditation is devoted to the external world what can be known of material things. The meditator reviews the ideas he has of external things and, as noted, he nds that their mathematical properties can be clearly and distinctly perceived. But the same is not true of other sensible properties: colour, heat, taste, and the like. But the real question is whether there are any material objects at all. The meditator begins by enunciating a principle that follows from the clarity-and-distinctness rule: (p) everything which i clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by god so as to correspond exactly with my understanding of it. Now (p) has to hold, since otherwise god would be a deceiver: it has to be at least possible for things to be as they (clearly and distinctly) appear. The question is whether they in fact are as they appear.
