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Can you doubt that you exist? If not, why? In the first two meditations of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes aims to defeat scepticism through being sceptical about everything we believe exists, challenging the evidence of the senses, cultural presuppositions and even the fundamental process of reasoning itself. Descartes insists that the information we receive and interpret from our senses about the external world may turn out to be mistaken, insisting that things are not always as they seem to be and that we can never trust that which we perceive. This argument claims that we are under the spell of a perceptual illusion. In our lives we correct mistaken perceptions by referring to the rights ones, but since we cannot be sure at first which cases are true and which are not, it is possible to doubt any particular bit of sensory knowledge. His systematic method for doubting...

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