quaerentes.net

I was recently listening to an audiobook of Rene Descartes’ ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ while driving through Ontario’s northland, and thought it worth some words. I’m only through the first two meditations, but there’s still much food for thought there. I’m not exactly sure what to make of his assrtion that anything “clearly and distinctly perceived” must be true. I think it all depends on what he means by those two words. Distinctly seems to mean something that can be isolated from other ideas and taken as an argument or proof of an idea which doesn’t beg questions, and doesn’t require proofs of something else to validate it. Not sure if there’s more to it than that, but most likely I’m missing something. Clarity, I guess, is the absense of vagueness or ambiguity in the argument or idea. Anybody have thoughts on how these two criterea would or would not constitute knowledge of something true?