Remigius Achinike Obah

A Critical Analysis of René Descartes’ ‘Meditation One’

The problem of certain and indubitable knowledge has preoccupied Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics through the medieval era to the dawn of modernity. The renaissance era inaugurated a decisive shift from the theocentricism of medieval thinkers to the anthropocentrism of the modern man, generating competing methodological frameworks — the Baconian empirical-inductive and the Galilean mathematical-deductive methods — whose controversy gave rise to a renewed general scepticism. This paper critically examines René Descartes’ ‘Meditation One’, assessing both the philosophical significance and …