Skepticism is the philosophical position that one should refrain from making truth claims, and avoid the postulation of final truths. Descartes first makes the argument that all knowledge is subject to doubt, that all of reality including himself might not exist. He then tries to figure out which beliefs are least sensitive to doubt and are entirely certain. The argument for skepticism isn't that doubts about our senses or physical bodies existing are probable, but that these doubts can never actually be ruled out. If these doubts can never be proven to be untrue, there cannot be certainty about those things, only true beliefs.

The cogito is Descartes' principle argument that he cannot doubt that he exists because he is capable of thinking. Doubting is a form of thinking, and thinking can only occur if something exists. Even if your thoughts are incorrect or imparted to you by an evil demon, you have to exist to even have those thoughts so that much cannot be doubted.

First person privilege means that a person has privileged access to his/her own thoughts and that others do not have this same access. 

There are three sources of ideas: innate, adventitious, and invented. An idea can only be caused by something with as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality. 

Something has objective reality in virtue of representing something else. 

Something has formal reality due to the virtue of it simply existing. Can be either finite, infinite, or modal reality.

The will cannot be defective, because it is limitless just like God. However, the use of the will to make judgements on what the intellect does not clearly and distinctly perceive is the source of error.

The intellect is the tool used to understand and rationalize our perceptions. There are different levels of intellect that one can possess, with God having the highest level.

Substance dualism refers to the idea that the mind and body are two separate things. There are physical substances and mental substances that each can exist independently from one another. 

Nietzsche studies the genealogy of morals, meaning that he studies the origins of morality. Nietzsche determines that evils arise due to hatred and resentment. 

The slave revolt in morality occurs when resentment itself turns creative and gives birth to values. The lower people reverse what the aristocrats conceive as good and turn it bad. They cannot create values on their own, they can simply twist the values envisioned by the aristocrats. The lower people learn to hate and resent the power and health of the masters.

The Master Morality thinks that the low, the "bad," is an afterthought and is noticed only as a contrast that brings out more strongly the superiority of the noble ones.

Ressentiment is 

Nietzsche believed that bad conscience came about with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to permanent settlements. All our animal instincts of life in the wild became useless, and, in order to survive, we had to rely on our conscious mind rather than our unconscious instincts. 

Nietzsche suggests that instincts that cannot be released outwardly must be turned inward. The instincts of hunting, cruelty, hostility and destruction that characterized our pre-historic lives had to be suppressed when we entered into society. As a result, we turned all this violence in toward ourselves, made ourselves a new wilderness to be struggled against and conquered. In so doing, we developed an inner life and bad conscience. When we force this instinct inwards, we feel resentment and hatred towards ourselves. 

Nietzsche traces the development of the bad conscience beginning with the sense of indebtedness early tribe members must have felt toward the founders of the tribe. As the tribe became increasingly powerful, there was an increasing debt that had to be paid to these revered ancestors. Given enough time, these ancestors came to be worshipped as gods. As "the maximum god attained so far," the Christian God also produces the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness. This debt cannot possibly be repaid, and so we develop the concepts of eternal damnation and of all people being born with irredeemable original sin. The genius of Christianity is then to have God (as Christ) sacrifice himself in order to redeem all our sins: God, the creditor, sacrifices himself out of love for his debtor.

Asceticism is severe self-discipline without indulgence. It is seen in poverty, humility, and chastity. Asceticism tries to eliminate will and desire entirely (a form of self-torture). 

• The cause of this self-torture is the struggle against ourselves and our natures.
• Pitying ourselves causes the resentment to grow.

•  

Behaviorism is a school of psychology that confines itself to the study of observable and quantifiable aspects of behavior and excludes subjective phenomena, such as emotions or motives.

The good, according to Murdoch, is a transcendent reality, meaning that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful. 

The Good is a way of allowing us to look past our selfish natures and see the world for what it truly is. The humble man is the most likely to achieve goodness, but that is not to say that he will indefinitely do this.

The two main arguments are:

1. though there is waking experience, I can never know which moments are dreams and which are waking

2. that his whole life is a dream and that there is no waking world

The first interpretation suggests that Descartes cannot trust his senses because they can convey things to him when he is asleep that seem real, such as the warmth of a fire. If his senses can do this that means he cannot trust that the fire exists in his waking life. However, there are some things like arithmetic and geometry that are universal that he knows must exist.

The second interpretation suggests that there is no experience that he can claim to be real because he might be sleeping the whole time. 

Descartes says that error arises in our judgment due to our tendency to exercise the will over matters that the intellect does not fully comprehend. He claims that neither the intellect nor the will is defective because both are passed down from a perfect and omnibenevolent being. The will is in fact infinite because humans have complete freedom to choose their beliefs and actions. The intellect is limited in that humans do not have the infinite knowledge of God. However, Descartes argues that humans do not require infinite knowledge to never err. He believes that because our will is unlimited and because we have the freedom to exercise judgment over things beyond our understanding, we make mistakes. If we did not have this free will, even with our limited intellects we would never err because we would be cognizant of our limitations and not pass judgment over things that we do not understand. Descartes' does make a compelling argument in that if we did refrain from taking action if we did not fully understand something, we would never err. This does seem to put God off the hook, but there is still a question of why doesn't God simply just create humans without this free will. Perhaps responsibility for our error can rest with God because he could just make us without this potentiality for fault.  

Descartes argues that he has a passive faculty of sensory perception and that once the senses are used, you cannot choose what you perceive. The exercise of this passive faculty of perception cannot be done without some active faculty capable of forming and producing ideas. This active faculty of perception can only come from either thought, from God, or from a corporeal body. He argues that the active faculty is not within him because then that would mean that he is the creator of all that he perceives. He says that if God gave him a natural inclination to believe something but no way to find out if it's false then God would be a deceiver. Since God is not a deceiver, the active faculty of perception is not within him. If God was responsible for all sensory perception then everything we perceive would be clear and distinct, but we often make errors in what we see. So from this, Descartes concludes that corporeal bodies are the active perception. This does make sense because if God was responsible for sensory perception, everything we see would be perfect to us without any blur. However, the argument still does not seem to rectify the 

Descartes argues that the mind, however unextended, can interact with bodily things but he claims that understanding how this interaction occurs should not be done philosophically. To understand these interactions one must actually observe them taking place rather than ponder on them as a metaphysical thing. The princess responds by saying that it would be easier for her to grasp concept of a material mind than an immaterial thing moving a material thing. She says that it is easy to believe that the senses like touch and taste illustrate the mind's connection to the body, but Descartes fails to explain the exact cause of that interaction. He seems to suggest that the notion of mind-body interaction requires a considerable amount of faith and cannot be explained through thought.  

Nietzsche believed that the original distinction between good and bad came from the masters or aristocrats of Greek antiquity who believed themselves to be better than others due to their great wealth, honor, and power. In many languages the origin of the word good is derived from the same root as words for master, rich, or powerful. They believed that these qualities made them good and the absence of such qualities in others (slaves) made them bad. 

Despite the view that the aristocrats had of the slaves, they did not hate them. Their morality was the Master Morality. Nietzsche believed that this distinction between good and evil came about when the slaves grew resentful about the rich and decided to reverse the definition of good (Slave Morality). They deem the aristocrats as evil and they define the good as being the opposite reflection of evil. To be weak, humble, poor and not harm anyone is considered good by the slaves. The slaves hate the masters simply because they are not as powerful as them. This seems like an easy way to feel better about oneself, and Nietzsche believed that it wasn't an altruistic conscience that compelled the slaves to believe this but simply a lack of power.  

The masters did not describe themselves in opposition to the slaves. They simply were cognizant of their superiority but they did not resent them. Their values were completely made up by them. The slaves' values however were born from an opposition to the values held by the masters.

The consequences of this transformation are that people begin subverting themselves. They begin to value pity, weakness, and shame instead of violence, assertiveness, and honor. This causes them to become timid and weakens people's creativity and ambition. If people subject themselves to this idea that it is better to be humble and pious, they will never live up to their full potential and achieve what they ultimately want: the power and wealth of the masters.

Murdoch contends that the good is indefinable because of the notion that the will is the creator of value. Values which were once in some sense inscribed in the heavens and guaranteed by God collapse into the human will. The idea of the good remains empty so that human choice may fill it.