Analysis Of Rene Descartes Meditation

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In meditation II, Rene Descartes describes the wax experiment. Descartes's purpose of the wax experiment is to show how our senses are unreliable, using the experiment as his argument. He states that there’s a complication with empiricism and that the wax is identified through the mind, which means it is rationalism. Descartes also shows how we perceive things and their qualities. Rene Descartes first describes the wax, “everything is present in the wax that appears needed to enable a body to be known as distinctly as possible.” Descartes describes the wax using all the senses. He moves the solid wax into the heat and that is when all of the properties transform. Descartes says that the wax “loses what’s left of its taste, it gives up its smell, it changes changes color…” It is not the same wax and does not have the same characteristics it once had, meaning our senses were unreliable. They are unreliable due to the fact that when we first inspect the wax, it is completely different then when the wax is heated, but it is the same wax. …show more content…
He relates this by saying, if the wax is heated and changed into a different state, we still know its wax. We can imagine the wax in different shapes and sizes, but does not exactly indicate what the wax is. Descartes tries to argue that the imagination is not the intellect because the intellect interprets clearly and distinctly. We can not use the mind alone to know what the wax is. Both imagination and our senses are not a reliable source according to Descartes’s experimental conclusion; however, the senses advise us about the wax, but the senses cannot prove that the solid wax and the heated wax are the same. We can imagine the wax with different properties, but it is not useful for the knowledge of what the wax is, because it has many ways to be