In no more than three (typed, double-spaced, 12-point font) pages, please write an essay that incorporates responses to both of the two prompts ((a) and (b)) below. You do not need an introductory paragraph or a concluding paragraph. Instead, you may simply leap in with answering the question. Please use supporting quotes for evidence and context. For example, you could start your essay by saying something very similar to what I say in the first sentence of the first prompt, and then go on to explain Descartes’s arguments.
(a) In the Third Meditation, Descartes does not think that we have any good reason to believe that our adventitious ideas of bodies are caused by external objects that resemble our ideas of them. What are Descartes’s arguments for this claim?
(b) By the end of the Meditations , Descartes has changed his position regarding the question of whether we have good reason to believe that our ideas of bodies are caused by external objects that resemble our ideas (at least in some respects). Carefully explain his reasoning in support of this change of position, making sure to explain what it is he has discovered between the Third and Sixth Meditation that accounts for this change of position. (Note that an adequate answer to this question will include an exposition of Descartes’s argument for the existence of bodies.)
