God in Meditations on First Philosophys Descartes

Subject Areas : Epistemological researches

seeyed mostafa  shahraeini ¹ (University of Tabriz)

Received: 2023-07-08 Accepted : 2023-08-06 Published : 2023-08-23

Keywords: god, Existence, innate ideas, adventitious ideas, factitious ideas, simple and complex ideas,

Abstract :

What we seek to show in the present paper is that although Descartes throughout his masterpiece, Meditations on First Philosophy, speaks of God, by this, he does not reveal one but only a redefinition of God for reaching a new idea of Him upon which he tries to build his system of knowledge. In his arguments for God, he seeks not to establish His existence like scholastics but only tries to prove God from a new idea of Him. In Meditations, the two main goals can be traced in parallel: First, to establish the new Cartesian system based on the redefinition of man, God, and the world; Second to do philosophy by avoiding challenging with Church to the extent that if philosophy cannot be done unless through this challenge, undoubtedly it must be stopped. The former goal is not principal while the latter is marginal, since no philosophy can be done when there is any fear of challenge and clash with others. The author tries to redefine God so that his subjectivism and the autonomy of thinking ‘I’ can be developed. At the same time, he cannot but speak of this redefined God in a scholastic Christian language in order to cause no hostility from the Church against the book. In spite of the fact that he, in Meditations, speaks of the existence of God and proves it, he does this task by recourse to the Idea of God and neglecting the external God. Descartes only tries to present a new definition of God that satisfies his system’s needs.

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