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A Meditation on Descartes Meditations In the Meditations, Descartes a knowledge seeking journey to find the indubitable foundations for knowledge. By subjecting everything to doubt Descartes hoped to discover whatever was immune to it. In order to best understand how and why Descartes builds his epistemological system up from his foundations in the way that he does, it is helpful to gain an understanding of the intellectual background of the 17th century that provided the …

…idea can be justly used as a foundation for knowledge. The most this gets us - and this is not a little - is the knowledge of our own existence each time we assert it. But Descartes' project should not be judged by us as a failure - the fact that he addressed topics of great and lasting interest, and provided us with a method we can both understand and utilise fruitfully, speaks for itself.