Here's a question for you before I move on to plunging into some of Descartes' texts. Most of us first of all, take ourselves to persist through time. We're going to see at the end of this course that there are some philosophers who challenged that idea. But, common sense at least in much of the Western tradition and probably many other traditions as well, take ourselves to be able to say, hey, there is a picture, one of my parents has of me, standing on the street corner and I just dropped an ice cream cone onto the street and there it is melting on the sidewalk near my feet You can say, that's me, that was the earlier version of myself. How do I know that's me? Well, first of all I have got all my family members and I've got the photograph. But also, you might say, I can remember that experience, I remember how it was funny and I was frustrated at the same time. That is to say, many of us can make very confident judgements of the idea of what philosophers refer to as personal identity over time. That is, there's a self that existed at some previous time. Here's a self right here in front of you or there's a self there in front of you, and you can say, there's an earlier stage so to speak, that I can say that's an earlier stage of me. That was me standing on the street corner. That was me learning how to ride a bicycle for the first time. That was me running in a pack of kids having fun as we made our way to the shore line, for example. As far as you can do that, you can take seriously the idea that you, this very self persists through time. Even though you change. Even though you go from being shorter to taller. You get a haircut. You may be dyeing your hair. You get some piercings, some tattoos. You changed in various ways. But you still say the same self persists and we can see the source of that by saying okay, I'm the one who got that piercing, I'm the one who got those tattoos, I'm the one who was running to the shoreline with my friends. As long as you can make sense of that, we can make sense for my purposes, for our purposes of the idea of persisting through time, first point. Second point, I want you to ask yourself, does seem it possible to you in principle, and I'm not asking you to say this definitely will happen but I want you to ask yourself whether this could happen. I hope this doesn't. But suppose that you get in a terrible, for example, car accident or bicycle accident. Does it seem possible to you that in spite of that terrible tragedy, you, the self that is you, could survive that experience? Of course, many theistic traditions will say that there will be a soul that survives the experience of the destruction of your body. But even if you're not a theist my question is just, do you think that that kind of thing is possible? Do you think that it could happen? That you could survive the destruction of your body. I ask my students at the beginning of semester to raise their hands if they think this kind of thing is possible even if they're not theists, even if they're not sure it will happen. Just asked whether that's a conceivable outcome, most of them raised their hands and said yes, they think it's possible. For now, that's all I need you to do is to make an honest judgment with yourself about whether you think that's possible, and write it down somewhere. I can't tell whether or not it's something that you vote on, either positively or negatively but I can ask you to tell yourself and be honest about it for later on. So remember that if an affirmative answers this question does not require that you be a theist, you only need to think that's a possibility and we'll come back to the point and not too long. Now, Descartes' Meditations, is broken up into six parts. Each of which is fairly short but don't be deceived by that because the writing in each case is fairly compact. There's a lot packed into just about every line. So don't be afraid, don't be put off if you find that as you read through it in, for example, the Early Modern Text's version on that website that I mentioned to you. If you read through some of those passages you might find: well I see the words, I see the sentences but there's a lot that seems to be going over my head. Don't be put off by that, that happens to everybody, but stick it out for the first or second or even sometimes the third time. Every time I read Descartes I find something else that I didn't notice before. So there's a lot of depth in the writing and we want to pay careful scrutiny. In the very first meditation, Descartes refers to what he calls the false opinions of his youth. What he means there is that he can look back on times when he was in school, maybe aged 10 or 12, that he took certain things to be obviously true and so obvious to be not even worth mentioning but that later on he's now come to be sceptical about. So suppose that you were raised in an environment in which the traditional theory of the role of the earth in the universe was that the earth was the centre of the universe: the so-called geocentric theory deriving from the ancient astronomer Ptolemy. Then suppose that in the course of your education, you hear about this guy Copernicus who's been going around saying that actually that's not true, the evidence suggests otherwise, there's better evidence that the Earth revolves around the sun, the so-called heliocentric theory. Suppose by the time you're 25, the heliocentric theory has now been widely accepted and it's one that you think is true as well. You might look back on that experience and say boy, when I was little, there were some beliefs that I took to be self-evident than it seems justified by the senses because I don't feel that, for example, as I stand here on the Earth it's moving in any sense, I don't feel like I'm revolving around anything. But now the scientific evidence suggests otherwise, contrary to common sense. Descartes says well, given that experience I can begin to wonder what else might be up for reconsideration, what other of the things that I now take to be self-evident, I could end up finding 10 or 15 or 20 years from now to have been mistaken. Maybe what I should do if I'm going to engage in this project of trying to find a new foundation for the sciences, is try to see how much I can question, how much I can doubt. He says: I want to raise everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations in order to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences. He's going to engage in this enterprise after having been bothered by this question for much of his young adult life. As a young adult he had been a bit of a soldier of fortune, Descartes, had done a lot of traveling, a lot of gambling and duelling but he had been nagged by these intellectual questions for a long time. Finally, he says I'm going sit down, I'm going to get comfortable, build a little fire in my wood stove, put on my dressing gown, get out some paper and my quill pen and see if I can write some of this out in such way as to make sense of it. He says at last I will apply myself earnestly and unreservedly to this general demolition of my opinions. When he talks about the general demolition of his opinions, that's not a masochistic as he might sound. What he has in mind is to say I want to stand back as much as possible from the opinions that I take to be true so to check to be self-evident and ask myself, which ones of those cannot be certain about, which ones of those can I take myself really to know? His first point is that in fact our senses often deceive us in one form or another. You might have been driving through the desert one day and found that up ahead it looked like there was water on the road, but in fact as you get close to that water it disappeared. But then you might have realized that it was not water but the mirage created by the heat. Or you've seen Muller-Lyer lines, you've seen various other optical illusions that people can create that will make you think one line is longer than the other even though it's not. That man standing in what seems like the back of a room is very tall and bigger than somebody in front of them or vice versa. Optical illusions famously will deceive our senses and can trick people. In addition to that there are hallucinations. You might be falling asleep. You might be under the influence of some kind of a controlled substance. You might be, for example, experiencing extreme sleep deprivation and you might experience some hallucinations in which, for example, you hear voices or you seem to see somebody moving in a mirror that you're looking at, you turn around and nothing's there. But you might wonder maybe I saw something, maybe not, was it a trick of the light, was it something coming from my mind. In some cases we might be deceived into thinking something that's there, there that is not and even there are cases of dreams in which we we find ourselves deceived. You probably had experience in which you were falling asleep and had the experience of falling and you shake yourself awake just for a moment before falling back asleep again. Maybe at that time, you believed that you were falling. Likewise, you might have had a roommate or a friend who was in the same room with you as you were sleeping and that as you woke up the person says "Hey, you yelled out somebody's name," or says that you we're screaming saying, help! I'm being chased by some hipsters and they're trying to throw me into a vat of Kampuchea or something. Your friend might say "Gosh, you must have some paranoia or something about hipsters." You must have believed at least at the time that it was happening that you were in danger of being thrown into a vat of Kampuchea. So the idea is that in dreams it seems like we're able to have beliefs that are not true but at the time they seem perfectly real to us, it seems if that's exactly how things were happening.
