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In Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, I do not understand Descartes’ concept of God and infinity. From what I understand, the existance of God can be proven, because the objective reality of the concept of infinity in our mind has to come from the formal reality of what is actually infinite. But he had said that the formal reality as the source of a objective reality does not have to resemble the objective reality. So the question is: How does Descartes know that God, like him, is a personaltiy, in other words, a thinking thing? Is he not too obsessed with the Christian concept of God?
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In the 5th Meditation, how does Descartes liberate the geometrical concepts from the doubt of the omnipotent devil? If I have read correctly, Descartes is attempting in the 5th Meditation to put aside the proof of God’s existance in the 3rd and 4th meditation and trying to establish a new ontalogical proof of god. So, in the 5th, neither the existance of the benevolent god nor the perfectness of understanding is guaranteed. Descartes claim here that the geometrical concepts in his mind have certain unchanging features. For example, the sum of a triangle’s angle is always 180 degrees. But if the doubt of the devil is still valid, how can he be free of doubt that five minutes ago he reasoned it was 180, and then five minutes later, due to the power of the devil, he reasoned it to be 360, and then thought it has not changed?
rene assumes that the devil cannot change the definitions of terms. if he really wanted to doubt the existence of anything, he could have… he simply didn’t doubt hard enough…
-Imp