Descartes' The First Meditation, subtitled "What can be called into doubt," opens with a Meditator reflecting upon the volume of falsehoods he has believed during his life and on the subsequent shakiness of the body of knowledge he has built up from these falsehoods. He has resolved to clear away all that he thinks he knows to start anew from the foundations, reconstructing his knowledge once more on stable grounds. Meditations, Volume 1 focuses upon the skepticism of a man confronting the instability of his perceptions of reality and upon life itself. He questions his senses, wrestles with deciding upon the Deific or Satanic origins of his deception, and ultimately determines that he cannot doubt the reality of his own existence. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the nature of Descartes' skepticism relating to the First Meditation, and to demonstrate the fallacy of his argument.
