Meditation I
•	not necessary to show all beliefs to be false
•	“I ought to withhold my assent just as carefully from what is not obviously certain and indubitable as from what is obviously false…” 
•	building metaphor – Descartes is looking for a solid foundation for his system, an Archimedean point.
•	Descartes’s doubt a methodical doubt to counterbalance the weight of his prejudices so that his bad habits no longer distort his grasp of things.  No danger of error in this.  He won’t overindulge in skepticism since he is now concerned not with acting but only with knowing.  (Anticipates Locke’s criticism.)  See 118.

Descartes’s five reasons to doubt:
1.	Our senses deceive us.  But surely we can (at least sometimes) tell the difference?
2.	I could be crazy. (But I’m not crazy – or, at least, we can’t found an epistemology on a dysfunctional state.)
3.	I might be dreaming.  His most powerful doubt so far.  What does this allow us to doubt?  Not everything.  The ideas in dreams are copied from real life and recombined.  Therefore, even if we are dreaming, we know that the most basic ingredients of our dreams are grounded in reality.  We cannot doubt “general bodily nature and its extension, the shape of extended things, their quantity (that is their magnitude and number), the place in which they exist, and the time through which they endure.”  Still the dreaming hypothesis gives us grounds to doubt those disciplines that involve composites and whether or not things really exist in the world (physics, biology, etc.).  Those disciplines concerned with simple, universal things, however (arithmetic, geometry and logic) are still indubitable at this point in the Meditations.  Whether one is awake or dreaming, 2+2=5.
4.	God could be deceiving me.  This is a very powerful ground for doubt, but Descartes is aware that many of his readers would reject it as blasphemous.  Therefore, he replaces it with doubt number 5:
5.	The evil genius.  Even the truths of mathematics are now called into question.  Is there anything we cannot doubt?

Putnam’s version.

What does the evil genius (or the brain in the vat) allow us to doubt?  What, if anything, doesn’t it allow us to doubt?  Is God off limits?  Should he be?  What’s with the fourth doubt?  Look for “secret clues” there.

Meditation II
•	the cogito (see boxed text on 118)
•	"I am, I exist."  What is this "I"?  A thinking thing.
•	inference or performance?
•	the piece of wax.  If we can only be sure of our existence as thinking things, then why is this idea less clear than our idea of external objects?