deceived. Descartes argues that even assuming there is an evil spirit who constantly deceives me, it is certain that my own self exists: for the very notion of an evil spirit assumes that the spirit deceives someone; me. So even if constantly deceived, I can’t doubt that I exist. Descartes holds that the sentence “I exist” must be true whenever I think it to myself. I may utterly deceive as to what I believe but even the most radical doubt of all, which is doubting my own existence, must imply that I exist. He creates the phrase, “cogito ergo sum.” This means, I think therefore I am. So according to Descartes, if he is able to think and reason, he exists. But in addition to that he can sense and imagine. However, Descartes believes that the senses and imagination are not trustworthy. Our senses are sometimes wrong and are not reliable, and therefore doubt is necessary. Our imagination has the ability to make up things that do not exist, and for that reason it is not reliable to knowing our essence. The ability to reason and our intellect prove to be much more reliable to knowing than the body and senses are.

The third meditation is titled “ The existence of God.” In his third meditation, Descartes states, “…as far as my parents are concerned, even if everything is true of them that I have ever thought to be so, certainly they do not conserve me in being, nor did they in any way produce me insofar as I am a thinking thing…” (Descartes 36). Here, he explains that he believes God was the one who created him, not his parents. God allowed for him to have the ability to think and reason, which is why he believes in the existence of God. After coming to the conclusion that he does exist, Descartes attempts to discover how he knows this and continues to use a similar reasoning for how other things that surround him exist. In this meditation, he distinguishes between “objective reality” and “formal reality”. Formal reality is the existence of objects that are outside our perception and is independent of it. The objective reality refers to ideas that we already have inside our minds. According to Descartes, all our ideas already possess a certain degree of objective reality. Each of these ideas has to trace its objective