Clear and distinct, obscure or confused

Crucial to the Cartesian epistemology.

So what are they?

Bluff?

Anyway.

The 3rd meditation, among other things, advances 2 proofs of the existence of God of which the first is the more novel, though both rely on the principle that the whole cause of something must contain "objectively or eminently" as much reality as its effect.

The 4th meditation echoes ancient skeptical themes about schooling oneself to withhold judgement regarding what is uncertain lest we believe what is false.

The 5th contains a defense of the ontological proof and claims knowledge of God's existence and veracity are foundational to the sciences, licensing continued confidence in things whose clear and distinct proofs are recalled but no longer before our minds.

Still a circle.

There are many nods to Plato in the Meditations, including reference to the doctrine of reminiscence which D does not literally accept and reference to the immutable and eternal essence of the triangle which he does literally espouse.

Elsewhere I have read that Schoolmen reconciled Platonic realism with Aristotelian conceptualism by locating the Ideas as concepts in God's mind.

D is absolutely drenched in scholastic learning.

Med 6. The argument that we cannot imagine a chiliagon - or its thousand sides - is bogus.

I can't perceive the difference between a chiliagon and a myriagon.

Does that mean I can't perceive either?

That we cannot perceive their sides?

No.

The famous possibility argument:

[B]ecause I know that all things which I apprehend clearly and distinctly can be created by God as I apprehend them, it suffices that I am able to apprehend one thing apart from another clearly and distinctly in order to be certain that the one is different from the other . . . .

[J]ust because I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing. . . .

[B]ecause, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul, by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.