Comparing And Evaluating René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy and Aristotle's Nicomachea

1 Comparing And Evaluating René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics In evaluating philosophers' arguments, it is critical that we first comprehend their reasoning on its terms before critiquing its validity. Through studying Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, I have chosen to focus on Descartes's theory of methodological doubt and philosophy of mind against Aristotle's ethics of virtue and happiness. Descartes ultimately constructs more rigorous arguments by establishing systematic doubt and the self as a primally thinking substance, contrasting Aristotle's reliance on undemonstrated premises about ethical absolutes providing human fulfillment. Using the TV show Lost as an accessible example revealing issues in interpreting truth and the mind's essence, I will show that Descartes's provocative questioning better engages substantive existential questions about knowledge and being. Descartes’s Theory of Doubt and the Self In Meditation One, Descartes constructs his theory of universal doubt by resolving to doubt all senses and preconceptions systematically and receiving beliefs that are not absolutely certain to build new knowledge on rational foundations. He states, "So today, I have set all my worries aside and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself, sincerely and without holding back, to demolishing my opinions" (Descartes 1). Descartes seeks some fact resistant to doubt to serve as the bedrock of certainty. Descartes first observes that sensory perception is dubious, as when a tower appears round from afar but squares up close. Next, even basic mathematics can be doubted, as an "evil genius" could deceive us about everything. However, Descartes argues that the very fact that he doubts, thinking, and perceiving proves he must necessarily exist in some form: "I shall