(For brevity’s sake, I’ll express this as ‘the triangle’s having the property P’.) But now, if he argues in the same way that Descartes does, he may appear to haveĬonfirmation of his false belief, as follows: ‘I vividly and clearly perceive that the triangle is right-angled but I doubt that it has the property P therefore it doesn’t belong to theĮssence of the triangle that it has the property P.’Īgain, even if I deny that the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides, I still remain sure that the triangle is right-angled-my mind retains the vivid andĬlear knowledge that one of its angles is a right angle. This, he may doubt, or not yet have grasped for certain, that the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides indeed he may even deny this if he has been Suppose someone knows for certain that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle, and thus that this angle and the diameter of the circle form a right-angled triangle.
But it isn’t clear to me that this knowledge is complete andĪdequate, enabling me to be certain that I’m not mistaken in excluding body from my essence. Thus, I am a thinking thing, not a body, and body doesn’t come into the knowledge I have of myself.’īut so far as I can see, all that follows from this is that I can obtain some knowledge of myself without knowledge of the body. It goes on being certain to me that I exist. Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Īntoine ArnauldI can’t see anywhere in the entire work an argument that could serve to prove this claim, apart from what is laid downĪt the start :‘I can deny that any body exists, or that anything is extended, but while I am thus denying, or thinking,
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