<p> Study Guide Worksheet #2</p><p>Meditation III</p><p>Please put your answers on additional pages, identifying them using the question numbers below.</p><p>1. Given what RD says in the first paragraph, what can we surmise about what Descartes thinks are the mental activities associated with what he calls thinking?</p><p>2. Descartes derives a general rule from the first item of knowledge he says is established as a result of the Cogito, i.e., the knowledge that he exist as a thinking thing. What is this general rule?</p><p>3. Early in the third Meditation RD distinguishes between ideas and other kinds of thoughts. From his comments, what does he mean by ‘ideas’ and how, according to him, do these kinds of thoughts differ from those he calls volitions, emotions and/or judgments?</p><p>4. Can ideas, strictly speaking, be false according to Descartes?</p><p>5. Descartes says that there are three kinds of ideas, and one of them we are not able to produce at will: adventitious ideas. These ideas are those that Nature teaches us to believe are formed because of sense perception (and, in the case of adventitious ideas about the mind, those inner perceptions by means of which we become aware that we have a mind with a set of active and passive faculties). At one point fairly early in this meditation, Descartes considers the possibility that we are mistaken in this natural belief that sense perceptual ideas arise in the mind due to the influence on our senses of objects external to our minds. He considers a possible source of these ideas that Nature doesn’t reveal to us, but which he thinks might be the source of these ideas. What does he call this possible source, and what makes it different from the source we ordinarily assign as the cause of our adventitious ideas of sense perception?</p><p>6. Is it true that Descartes claims there must be as much reality in the effect of a cause as there is in the cause?</p><p>7. There is one idea above all others that Descartes thinks the finite human mind is incapable of creating on its own. What is it?</p><p>8. Give Descartes’ definition of the word ‘God’ as he uses it in this meditation.</p><p>9. In this meditation Descartes gives two proofs for the existence of God. One of them relies on the claim that the idea of God is one that a finite human mind could not create. Please give the main premises and conclusion of the other proof (which appears late in this meditation).</p><p>10. Near the end of the third meditation, Descartes suggests how he will try to establish that God is not a deceiver. He does not actually give an argument to this conclusion in the third meditation, but he suggests in broad strokes how he will approach showing that it is not possible for God to be a deceiver. What does he say about this?</p>