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How do you know you are not dreaming?
Member rating: No Rating | Words: | Submitted: Thu Aug 17 2006
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How do you know you are not dreaming? After the revelation Descartes experienced on November 10, 1619, he undertook his own intellectual rebirth. His first step was to throw out everything he thought he knew, refusing to believe in even the most basic premises before proving them to himself. Descartes felt it would be a waste of time to attack each idea individually; instead, he attacked what he considered the very foundation: the idea that sense perception conveys accurate information. He developed several arguments to illustrate this point. Descartes applied illusion argument, dreaming argument, and evil genius argument, culminating in the "method of doubt" to achieve his goals: Mind and body are two different substances, the complete separation of the mental world and the physical world. To prove anything, Descartes has to call everything into doubt. This idea of thinking in philosophy is called scepticism, the practice of critically examining one's own...
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