Laura K. answered • 01/25/25
Patient and knowledgeable professor of philosophy and religion
In his Meditations Descartes is trying to discover what he can know with absolute certainty - with no room for doubt. In order to do that, he first must eliminate everything that he cannot know for certain. His method of doubt refers to the method he uses to eliminate all things that could possibly be doubted, and whatever rmeains is what he knows for certain. Meditations begins with doubting everything that could possibly be doubted, no matter how far-fetched, then arriving at what we can know with absolute certainty, then reconstructing a system of knowledge based in certainty (instead of things that are just assumptions or more likely than not to be true).
