Rene Descartes 1596-1650 Rene Descartes 1596-1650

Third Meditation: Descartes writes[34-35]:“I will shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I willeliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since thisis hardly possible, I will regard all such images as vacuous, false, andworthless. I will converse with myself and scrutinize myself more deeplyand in this way I will attempt to achieve, little by little, a more intimateknowledge of myself. I am a thing that thinks: that is, a thing that doubts,affirms, understands a few things, is ignorant of many thins, is willing, isunwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions; for as Ihave noted before, even though the objects of my sensory experience andimagination may have no existence outside me, nonetheless the modes ofthing which I refer to as cases of sensory perception and imagination, in sofar as they are simply modes of thing, do exist within me,-of that I amcertain.”72