Meditations on First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and the Distinction of the Soul from the Body Are Demonstrated [Paperback]

Rene Descartes (Author), Donald A. Cress (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0872201929 | ISBN-13: 978-0872201927 | Publication Date: October 1, 1993 | Edition: 3 Sub

Many other matters respecting the attributes of God and my own nature or mind remain for consideration; but I shall possibly on another occasion resume the investigation of these. Now (after first noting what must be done or avoided, in order to arrive at a knowledge of the truth) my principal task is to endeavour to emerge from the state of doubt into which I have these last days fallen, and to see whether nothing certain can be known regarding material things.

Editorial Reviews

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"The new version of Cress's translation of Descartes's Meditations has attained an unusually high degree of readability . . . and at the same time, of fidelity to the original." —Roger Ariew, University of South Florida, and Marjorie Grene (1910-2009), Virginia Polytechnic Institute --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Latin

Product Details

• Paperback: 59 pages
• Publisher: Hackett Pub Co; 3 Sub edition (October 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872201929
• ISBN-13: 978-0872201927
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Welcome to Modern Philosophy, April 30, 2004

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ctdreyer (NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Meditations on First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and the Distinction of the Soul from the Body Are Demonstrated (Paperback)

Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the few works of philosophy that absolutely every educated person needs to read at least once. This is required reading for anyone interested in philosophy or its history, and honestly I don't see how this work can be ignored by anyone interested in the history of ideas. It's also a work that I'd recommend to anyone who wants to be introduced to philosophy by reading the work of a great philosopher. And don't worry: it shouldn't take you more than an afternoon to read through it. But you can, of course, spend the remainder of your life thinking about the ideas contained in this work.

The Meditations has had an incalculable influence on the history of subsequent philosophical thinking. Indeed, according to nearly every history of philosophy you're likely to come across, this work is where modern philosophy begins. It's not that any of Descartes's arguments are startlingly original--many of them have historical precedents--but that Descartes's work was compelling enough to initiate two research programs in philosophy, namely British empiricism and continental rationalism, and to place certain issues (e.g. the mind-body problem, the plausibility of and responses to skepticism, the ontological argument for the existence of God, etc.) on the philosophical agenda for a long time to come. Moreover, Descartes was capable of posing questions of great intrinsic interest in prose accessible to everyone. So the Meditations is a work of value to both newcomers to philosophy and to those with a great deal of philosophical background.

The First Meditation is Descartes's implementation of his method of doubt. Descartes's aim here is to systematically doubt everything he believes that seems dubitable in any way and thereby to arrive at something that is absolutely certain and indubitable. Here Descartes formulates two very famous skeptical arguments: the dreaming argument and the evil demon argument. The dreaming arguments calls into question my current beliefs about the world by drawing attention to the possibility that I might be dreaming now. Can I know right now that I'm not dreaming? If not, doesn't it seem that I don't know much of anything? The evil demon argument is even more radical in that it focuses my attention on the possibility that almost my entire conception of reality is based on a very general delusion. What if my every experience and all my reasoning results from constant deception by some being with God-like powers? What, if anything, would I know if this were the case? These worries, Descartes thinks, allow him to doubt nearly all his beliefs, and it indeed they may preclude his having any certain knowledge at all.

The rest of the Meditations is Descartes's attempt to find something he can know for certain. Famously, he begins by claiming that he can be certain of his own existence. Even if he's dreaming or being deceived by an all-powerful evil demon, he can be sure that he exists. For he couldn't dream or be deceived unless he existed.

But even if he can be certain of his own existence, how can Descartes move beyond this to knowledge of a world outside his own mind? By appealing to the existence of God. He provides two distinct proofs for the existence of God: one a variant of the ontological argument, which attempts to prove God's existence from an appeal to the very concept of God, and one a type of cosmological argument, which attempts to prove God's existence by appealing to something whose only possible cause is God. Both these arguments, Descartes claims, prove that the world includes an absolutely perfect God. And it is the perfection of God that Descartes to be confident that he can know things beyond his own mind. For God, as a wholly perfect being, wouldn't provide Descartes with intellectual faculties that allow him to go wrong. Consequently, Descartes can be sure that his beliefs are generally correct, provided that he has used his intellectual faculties in the way God intended.

This work also includes a statement of the sort of mind-body dualism with which Descartes is widely associated. Although his arguments for dualism are obscure here, it is fairly easy to explain the central idea. According to Descartes, mind and body are wholly distinct kinds of substance that interact with one another. Mental states aren't a part of the natural world revealed by the sciences, and so, for instance, they are not reducible to certain things going on in a brain. Instead, they're a wholly different type of thing--though a type of thing that is somehow causally connected to a brain.

All of this is material, and a lot more, is covered in roughly sixty pages of text, and it is presented in some of the clearest, most straightforward philosophical prose ever written. Plus, the reader needn't have mastered any arcane jargon or previous work in philosophy to understand Descartes's views. And because it is written as a series of meditations in which Descartes leads us through something like his own process of through about these issues, it makes for relatively easy reading.

This is a serviceable edition of the Meditations and the Discourse for students, and I'm sure it's perfect for the average reader. The translation is readable, and it doesn't seem significantly different from other translations of Descartes that I've read. While there aren't a lot of frills here, there's a very brief account of Descartes's life and a short bibliography. (For more serious students, I'd recommend Cottingham's edition of the Meditations that is published by Cambridge University Press. And Descartes enthusiasts should check out the second volume of the Cambridge Edition of the Philosophical Writings of Descartes, which includes Cottingham's translation of the Meditations along with the entire text of the objections and replies.)

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best introduction to modern philosophy in a reliable and cheap edition!, August 31, 2005

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Nathan Andersen "film lover, philosophy profe... (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Meditations on First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and the Distinction of the Soul from the Body Are Demonstrated (Paperback)

Descartes' meditations really is the place to start for thinking through the philosophical obsessions of the modern era -- the value of skepticism, the nature and extent of knowledge, the relation between mind and body, the role of theology in a rational account of the universe, subjectivity vs. objectivity, the primacy of the subject, freedom, etc.

This is a book that can be read for these themes even by those who are encountering it for the first time without guidance. At the same time this is a book that rewards reading and rereading, not only in the sense that you should read it more than once but that you should come back to it again and again after you have read the other classical works of philosophy that both preceeded it and that it paved the way for. After a serious study of Kant, for example, you may find that you can come back to Descartes and see that much of the work of Kant's critical project was already prepared for in this little treatise. That is not to say that Kant is not original, but that part of Kant's genius is in thinking through and making explicit the scope of the philosophical landscape that was first mapped out in the Meditations.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank Heaven for Descartes, May 26, 2010

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Mike Robinson "Mike A Robinson: Apologetic An... (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Meditations on First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and the Distinction of the Soul from the Body Are Demonstrated (Paperback)

When I was in the midst of my educational pursuits, I took my first course in philosophy. One day my professor stumped the class with the question: "What do humans have that is distinct from non-human animals? Is there anything unique about humans?" The professor then contended that when one surveys all animal species there isn't anything fully unique about mankind. Although the class tried, no one was able to mount an effective argument that refuted his premise.

Nevertheless, one thing that human beings do that no other species attempts is epistemology: asking how we know what we know. The whole mass of the animal world lacks the ability to build an epistemic view.

And Rene Descartes was one of the chief thinkers who helped birth modern epistemology. Descartes aspired to set in motion human knowledge afresh through finding a place to ground indubitable knowledge. He sought to thrust aside the collected mass of rational predispositions, preconceptions, prejudices, partialities, and biases of the past and construct form the epistemic ground up, constructing one logical certainty upon another.

Descartes was mathematician; philosopher and a true mastermind in the early epistemological pursuits as he embraced dualism. Additionally he's the author of the controversial: "I think therefore I am" formulation; since I am thinking, I must exist. His aim was to find an immovable impossibility of the contrary foundation as the starting point within a fuller epistemic scheme. Most, from all epistemic schools, believe that Descartes failed and at best made a case for solipsism. Nonetheless his work helped launch countless valuable epistemological pursuits.

Furthermore many admire his ontological argument for the existence of God, although Plantinga has recently devised a much more potent OAFEG.

Descartes was a central and essential pioneer of modern epistemology and mathematics; the world would be much inferior without his exceptional, yet dated, work.

* Epistemology: The study of how we know what we know, the nature and basis of knowledge, the accounting and justifying of knowledge claims, and the sources and scope of knowledge. Epistemology explores the question: What do men ordinarily denote when they say that they `know' something?

* Laws of Logic: Abstract, non-concrete laws of thought and reason that are nonmaterial, universal, obligatory, and absolute. All rational communication and thinking assume the laws of logic. The most well known law is the law of non-contradiction: A cannot be A and not-A at the same time in the same way. A man cannot be his own father. The laws of logic reflect the nature and mind of God; thus, they have ontological grounding--that is, they are grounded in the very nature of truth itself and cannot be reduced to human convention, opinion, or psychology. Reject the laws of logic, including the law of non-contradiction, and rational thinking is impossible. To deny the law, one must use the law in attempting to deny it. Those who deny logic are participating in a self-refuting effort.

Buy this, ruminate over Descartes' assertions, and expand your own epistemic method.

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