tart all over by rebuilding his knowledge from the ground up. This is were he developed the method. The rules of the method were to reject everything that you believe to be true unless you know with absolute certainty it is true. The second rule dealt with solving complicated problems. He discovered that you needed breakdown complicated problems into smaller problems to solve them. Thirdly, Descartes figured that the best way to learn about big things that were hard to analyze would be to look for similar, smaller things and attempt to understand them. By this I mean if you want to learn about larger things start small and work your way up. The final rule in Descartes method was to go over calculations again and again to be very thorough. The first rule was a very radical rule. It knocked down the old house of philosophy in order to build a new one over from the foundation. Descartes was in search of the truth. He realized that the principle of his new philosophy could in no way be doubted. Instead of going through all of ideas and theorems to find an indubitable piece of knowledge he boiled everything down to three things. Descartes decided that if these bases could ever be a source of error then we should not look any farther into what these three things lead up to because their base was a possible source of error. The first base was the senses. Descartes knew that at times our senses could fool us. At times we see things or hear things that in fact are not present. The second was calculation and reasoning. This too could be a source of error. His last base was existential judgment. This too he reasoned could in fact be doubted. At this point Descartes realized that he needed to doubt everything. He got to a point when he in fact doubted whether or not he existed. He thought maybe he was made to believe that he existed by a machine or some other force. As he was thinking, he reasoned that in fact he was think...
