Explain Descartes' Method of doubt; what does he hope to accomplish Essay

Explain Descartes' Method of doubt; what does he hope to accomplish from this method; is Descartes a skeptic - Essay Example Using this dreaming hypothesis, Descartes finds a way to doubt the materialistic world’s certainty, which also lays the basis for Descartes’s doubt regarding mathematics. Just like this world could be a deception, there could be an evil genius who could convince Descartes into believing that 2 added to 3 makes 6, which is certainly not true. The prime goal of Descartes is to build a safe foundation for the philosophy. Most of Descartes’s writings belong to the period when the modern science was starting to advance, and Descartes was of the opinion that the scientists had a very subjective idea of how to advance in their urge to create knowledge. Hence, Descartes decided to provide the scientists with a solid starting point that was in essence, an Archimedean fulcrum. Descartes achieved this by introducing a Method of Doubt with which, he could express his doubts regarding the knowledge’s structure in a systematic way. Although Descartes seems like a skeptic, but in reality, he is not one. Skepticism, as explained before, is only a method using which Descartes critically analyzes things and facts so as to reach at a conclusion with a solid rationale for it. An in-depth analysis of Descartes’s philosophy suggests that he has very much played the role of a religious zealot on his time. â€Å"Scepticism is a form of anti realism† (â€Å"Descartes meditation 1†) whereas Descartes used his philosophy to explore realism. In order for one to be characterized as a skeptic, it is imperative that one always remains skeptical about one’s stance on things, whereas Descartes starts analyzing a matter from a skeptical position, only to establish a conclusion at the end. This is not skepticism since it leads to confidence and surety that lacked in the start of the analysis. This essentially means that rather being a skeptic in essence, Descartes made use of skepticism as a means to cr itically analyze things, which is why he is