here is the link of the reading; https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/desca…
oh and pls make it look easy and do not use any complicated words or sentences
Read Discourse on the Method, parts 3, and 4 please respond to the following questions:
1. What connection does Descartes see between our “intellect” (our ability to distinguish what is true and false) and our “will” (our ability to choose what is good or bad)? Do you think that we need to judge well in order to act well?
2. Why does Descartes decide to get rid of all his former opinions? Do you think it’s possible to really do this? Why or why not?
3. What’s Descartes’s reasoning for rejecting everything that we come to know through the senses? Can you think of any examples of knowledge that does not come to us through the senses?
4. Descartes claims that even if everything that we know through the intellect and the senses is false, there remains one thing that must be absolutely and completely true. What is this?
5. What is Descartes’s argument for claiming that the soul is better known than the body and will exist unchanged without the body?
6. What is the argument for Descartes’s conclusion that God exists? Why does he think that most people are confused or doubtful about the existence of God or the soul? Do you agree with his reasoning here?
then read parts 5 and 6, and respond to the these five questions:
1. How would you describe what happens in the history of the imaginary universe that Descartes supposes? Why doesn’t he insist that this is what happened in the actual universe?
2. Descartes describes an imaginary human body that lacks a “rational soul” (notice his use of a Scholastic term!). What can this body do? What kinds of things that you and I do that this “automaton” can also do?
3. Descartes lacks that there are some things that the automation could not do because it lacks a rational soul. What are they? Do you agree with Descartes that no machine could possibly do these things?
4. How does Descartes describe the relation between body and soul? How does he connect this to both (1) denying that animals have souls of any kind at all and (2) how to live a good, virtuous life?
5. What reasons does Descartes give for publishing his thoughts in this Discourse, given that he said at the outset that they apply mostly to himself? What reasons does he give for saying that he chose to write in French rather than in Latin? Do you agree that Descartes’s works have the practical benefit that he claimed for them?
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