Customer Reviews

Meditations on First Philosophy / Meditationes de prima philosophia: A Bilingual Edition (English and Latin Edition)

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It is helpful to have an inexpensive edition of the Latin Meditations. The painfully literal English "translation" that accompanies it in this volume may serve as a handy vocabulary crib, but by itself is unreadable-- although generally reliable. Curiously, even the translator's own introduction does not reveal a more comfortable writing style: sentences grow into paragraphs, and paragraphs swell into pages. Parenthetical expressions are occasionally embedded three-deep, and the subject matter vacillates between textual trivia and attempts at profundity.

Unusable as an undergraduate text, but thanks for the Latin!

Be Careful! This is NOT the translation described in the Amazon reviews. It is a the unreadable one by Heffernan. This edition is useful only for its Latin text. The facing English can be used as an aid to the reader, but is often so stiff and convoluted as to be unreadable as English. The fifty-page introduction is full of trivia and misinterpretations. The volume is quite justifiably out of print!

Contrary to what the previous reviewer claims, Heffernan's translation is one of the best available if the benchmark for one's choosing of a translation is that of faithfulness to the original text. Other translation available oversimplifies Descartes' sentence for the sake of elegance. But one should always remember that beauty in any philosophical text comes not from the words itself, but from the ordering and structure of the words and ideas (Descartes himself emphasised a similar point).

True, Heffernan is committing comercial suicide by adhering so closely to the original text in order to produce a literal translation, but this translation is exactly what a serious student of Cartesian thought needs. Of course, such accuracy is (unfortunately for Heffernan) not required for most students of philosophy.

Descartes's _Meditations_ were his greatest work and this edition allows the assiduous student to read it in the original Latin. His ideas are not often accepted wholesale today, and to our modern and postmodern ears they might sound crude and naive. Nevertheless, Descartes's role as an originator of argumentative style and discourse is of gargantuan importance to the development of early modern philosophy. A great book.