[1] In the first of his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes imagines that a malevolent God[1] or an evil demon, of "utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me."
It is to deal with this problem that Descartes decides he must do more than just acknowledge that the beliefs are open to doubt and must deceive himself, "by pretending for a time that these former opinions are utterly false and imaginary" and that he shall do this "until the weight of preconceived opinion is counter-balanced and the distorting influence of habit no longer prevents my judgement from perceiving things correctly".
It is to achieve this state of denial that Descartes says he will suppose that "some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me".
"[8]: 35 Vendler argues that literary form of the Meditations is heavily influenced by St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises to which Descartes will have been exposed during his training at the Jesuit college of La Fleche.
As such, "The demon in the First Meditation is not evoked to serve as an epistomological menace, but as a psychological device: following Loyola's advice age contra!
"[10]: 204 Hatfield takes a similar line saying, "Descartes adopts a common practice from the spiritual exercises upon which his metaphysical meditations are modelled, devising a program for training the will to keep the old beliefs at bay"[11]: 87 adding, "It seems likely that he chose to call his hypothetical deceiver a "malicious demon" in order to avoid having the meditator concentrate extensively on the thought that God could be a deceiver, a proposition he considered false and one he intended to refute later.
Descartes was threatened with having his views condemned by a synod, but this was prevented by the intercession of the Prince of Orange (at the request of the French Ambassador Servien).
[5] The accusations referenced a passage in the First Meditation where Descartes stated that he supposed not an optimal God but rather an evil demon "summe potens & callidus" (translated as "most highly powerful and cunning").
Descartes' response to the accusations was that in that passage he had been expressly distinguishing between "the supremely good God, the source of truth, on the one hand, and the malicious demon on the other".
[5] According to Janowski, "The alleged distinction between the respective powers of God and the evil genius that escaped the attention of the two theologians also escaped the attention of a host of distinguished Cartesian scholars (Alquié, Beck, Brehier, Chevalier, Frankfurt, Gilson, Kenny, Laporte, Kemp-Smith, Wilson), who, only seldom interested in interpreting Descartes' philosophy through the prism of doctrinal orthodoxy, also insist on the omnipotence of the evil genius.
For example, Wilson notes that "Gouhier has shown, the hypothesis of the malign spirit takes over from that of the Deceiving God from the end of the First Meditation to the beginning of the Third—where the latter figure is resubstituted without comment or explanation.
"[12]: 32 She adds in the accompanying footnote that, even if one has to concede that the text doesn't reveal any sharp distinction between the power hypothetically ascribed to the 'malignant spirit' and that genuinely attributable to God, "Gouhier's observation is essentially accurate, and useful in understanding the rhetoric and organization of the first three Meditations.
Kenny says, "The purpose of taking seriously the hypothesis of the evil genius is to counterbalance natural credulity and keep in mind the doubts raised by the supposition of the deceitful God.
If the braino is operated by an evil being, whom Cornman and Lehrer call Dr. O, then it would be possible for Dr. O to create in a person experiences that are identical to the ones of the supposed real world.
[citation needed] In 1973, in the introduction to his book Thought, Gilbert Harman said, "it might be suggested that you have not the slightest reason to believe that you are in the surroundings you suppose you are in ... various hypotheses could explain how things look and feel.
You might be sound asleep and dreaming or a playful brain surgeon might be giving you these experiences by stimulating your cortex in a special way.
Perhaps you are quite a different person from what you seem..."[14]: 5 Such scenarios had been used many times in science fiction but in philosophy it is now routine to refer to being like a 'brain in a vat' after Hilary Putnam produced an argument which, ironically, purported to show that "the supposition that we are actually brains in a vat, although it violates no physical law, and is perfectly consistent with everything we have experienced, cannot possibly be true.