Category: Meditating with Descartes
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What If Descartes Had Spoken Freely? — The Thinkers Who Said What He Could Not
The Meditating with Descartes series on this site traces six meditations — six steps in the most influential philosophical project in western history. What emerges across those six pages is not just a comparison with the Buddha Dharma. It is the outline of a tragedy. In the Third Meditation, Descartes found infinite perfection inside his…
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Meditating with Descartes — Mind, Body, and the Tantric Reframe, His Sixth Meditation.
The Sixth Meditation is where Descartes mind body problem becomes the inheritance of western civilisation. Having sent God outside in the Third Meditation — the first division — Descartes now splits the human person itself in two. Mind and body declared categorically separate substances. Res cogitans and res extensa. The ghost and the machine. This…
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Meditating with Descartes — Essence, Existence, and Buddha-Nature. His Fifth Meditation.
In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes sent God outside — found infinite perfection within his own mind and externalised it, codifying the first division that western philosophy, theology, and science would inherit whole. In the Fifth Meditation, we see what follows from that division immediately and necessarily. Having placed God outside, Descartes must now prove God…
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Could Descartes speak his mind or did the Church threaten his existence? The Cartesian Conundrum
Descartes, a key figure in Western philosophy, challenged the Catholic Church with his ideas about the mind and consciousness. His “Cogito, ergo sum” encapsulates his philosophy of radical doubt and the importance of consciousness. His dualistic theory of mind and body conflicted with the Catholic view of their unity, leading to scrutiny and censorship. Similarly,…
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Descartes Fourth Meditation Embracing the Path of Enlightenment: A Buddhist Perspective on Certainty and Truth
Descartes truth — the question of what grounds our knowledge of reality — is the central concern of the Fourth Meditation. Having established his own existence and proven God’s existence through the causal adequacy argument in the Third Meditation, Descartes now asks: given that God exists and is perfectly good, what does that tell us…
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Meditating with Descartes — Consciousness, God, and the Nature of Mind. His third Meditation
In René Descartes’ Third Meditation, he examines the mind’s role in shaping existence, asserting that the certainty of his thoughts confirms his existence as a thinking being. He emphasizes the inseparable connection between the mind and the self, highlighting the primacy of consciousness in defining one’s being. This exploration resonates with Vajrayana Buddhism, emphasizing the…
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Meditating with Descartes, Cogito and the Inseparable Thinker. His Second Meditation.
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Are we really who we think we are? What is the sum of all our thoughts? What is god? These are all wonderful questions that mankind has been asking since beginingless time. Both western and eastern philosophers have wrestled with them but in slightly different ways. I want to explore how close western philosophers like…
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Meditating with Descartes — Doubt, Nihilism, and the Buddhist Void
Descartes is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of our time. He formed our concepts in the west about mind and our existence, although heavily influenced by the catholic church his ideas and theories are here to stay in one form or another. This discussion I intend to start is to discover what similarities…
