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Rene Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies

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This is the preferred choice of teachers and scholars seeking an English language translation of this central text of philosophy. Not only is the text extremely readable, this translation comes with an excellent introduction written by a highly regarded scholar in the field of Descartes scholarship. If you're looking for a first-rate translation of the Meditations (and a great introduction to the writings of one of the best philosophers of the early modern period), you can't go wrong with this choice. Although it is a little more expensive than some of the other available translations, I recommend it above all others.

Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy 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.

This is an excellent edition of the Meditations for students for a number of reasons. First, it's the same translation of the Meditations (and of the relevant passages from the Objections and Replies) that appears in the Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch three-volume edition of the philosophical works of Descartes, which is quickly gaining wide acceptance as the best edition of Descartes's work in English. Second, it includes a selection of important passages from the objections and replies to Descartes's Meditations. So this volume allows you to see some of the most serious objections to Descartes's work that were made by his contemporaries along with his responses to those objections. Finally, this edition includes some helpful introductory material. It includes two different introductions: one by Bernard Williams that focuses on Descartes's method and the most important lines of argument in the Meditations; the other by John Cottingham, the translator and editor of this edition, focusing on the place of the Meditations within Descartes's philosophical corpus.

That said, it's time to talk about the content of the Meditations. The first, and most famous, of the Meditations 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. Whatever he can discover to be certain in this way, he thinks, will provide him with a firm foundation for the remainder of his knowledge. 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.

If these are real possibilities, how can he know anything? The rest of the Meditations is Descartes's attempt to answer this question. Famously, he begins by claiming that he can be certain of his own existence. Even if he is 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?

Descartes thinks he can get 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 content of the concept of God, and one a type of cosmological argument, which attempts to prove God's existence by appealing to a phenomenon 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 along with God's role as his role as a creator that allows 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 when he uses him as they were intended to be used. Consequently, Descartes can be sure that his beliefs are generally correct, provided that he has used his intellectual faculties in the way God intended. Thus, he can be sure that, in general, his views about the world around him are correct.

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 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.

I leave it to the reader to determine the merits of Descartes' thinking; that this work is seminal is obvious and needs no exegesis (nor does explanation of the text do any good for those who have yet to read it). The Cambridge edition is in my opinion the best out there for the English speaking world. It is a clean, literal rendering that does a great job of capturing the Latinate sense of Descartes' terminology in English with minimal obfuscation.

I really am pleased that I read this book because within its pages you can see the birth of our modern world.

Despite the fact that Rene contorted himself to try to prove that God exists; he still managed to create a great work. He began the inquiry into reality wherein we try to understand the world through experimentation. I think he failed in many ways to develop a coherent philosophical structure due to his attempts to please the Church but given the social conditions of the day this was the best that he could do. Even in this flawed analysis Rene paved the way for what would later become the Scientific Method.

I only wish that he could live today and write without fears of reprisal from religious entities.

This book is a required read for most philosophy programs across the country for both undergraduate and graduate studies. If you're not in a college class where you can find other minds to chew this with I would recommend reading journal articles or other writings from philosophers that responded in some way to the premise this author is putting forth.

This translation of Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy" is an excellent rendition of one of the most important works of Western Philosophy.

In this short series of "meditations", Descartes takes the reader on an adventure of sorts, questioning all that exists and attempting to see if there is anything that cannot be placed into doubt. After discarding nearly everything thought to be "true", Descartes finds that the only undoubtable truth is "I am, I exist".

Next we are taken on a journey and invited to meditate with the voice to ponder and attempt to prove without doubt the necessity of the existance of God, to learn to distinguish truth from falsity and to attempt to learn of the true nature of mind and body.

In addition to the main text of the six meditations, some selections from the Objections and replies are included. These are objections raised by Descartes' contemporaries and included as well are the replies to these objects that Descartes' himself offered.

This is a great work of Western philosophy and nobody should be without it.

In the 17th century, the world underwent dramatic and incredible changes. The Scientific Revolution was gathering pace, Europeans had experienced the Reformation and the Renaissance, and boundaries and horizons in all areas were being expanded and changed at a breakneck pace.

Into this time of upheaval comes Descartes, one of the greatest Philosophers to ever live anywhere in the world. While 'modern' philosophy, which broke off its roots from Scholasticism, does not necessarily begin only with Descartes, it is true in Descartes the agenda of post-Scholastic philosophy is most clearly and beautifully expressed in logical terms.

Descartes's project is to take into account the implications of the scientific revolution for philosophy; for Descartes, it is no longer religious authority or pure philosophical speculation which tells us the most accurate truths about the cosmos, but science based on observation and the use of mathematical and logical methods employed by the aid of natural human reason.

Descartes sets into motion an astonishing project into motion; to basically remove Scholasticism and its corrupt and inept attempts to understand the universe and replace it with a complete and unified system of knowledge, based on certain truths clear and knowable to anyone, whatever their class or background.

Descartes, following a plan of 'meditation', withdraws from the senses and attempts to consider the universe as it is to the intellect. Descartes carefully invokes several skeptical doubts about our knowledge, the existence of the external world, and our own existence and attempts to set out what he felt was true and what is not. The famous phrase 'Cogito ergo sum' is one result, though Descartes's overall system and arguments are more complex.

Descartes argues that the cogito, along with the goodness of God who does not make a creature merely in order to decieve it, ensures there are certain and indutible truths about ourselves and the world which will ensure his project will be a successful one. But Descartes encourages the reader not merely to accept his arguments but to put them into practice themselves, hoping in doing so they will discover new truths about the universe which will be plain to anyone using the light of reason.

Descartes in his other works uses this method as a justification for his approach to science and mathematics. Descartes was in every sense a polymath; a trained lawyer, an excellent writer, a student of human anatomy (in which Descartes made many pioneering experiments and observations), a brilliant philosopher and (for his time) physicist, and a mathematician of genius. However, while much of his science is now plainly wrong and was superseded by better scientists such as Galileo and Newton, the agenda Descartes set for philosophy remains much the same even today, especially in the Analytic tradition. Philosophy owes to Descartes two great achievements, one, in applying more rigorous logical methods to philosophical problems while paying attention to the results of science, and second, the re-introduction of skepticism into philosophy which provides a valuable check against dogmatism, but which would only truely be extended to its fullest possible means by David Hume.

Whether or not one ultimately agrees with Descartes's arguments, it must be acknowledged he is a great geius who stands shoulder to shoulder with people like David Hume, Liebniz, Spinoza and Kant, who all radically changed the way philosophers look at the world and the problems it poses.

Proof that God exists. "It is manifest by the natural light that there must be at least as much [reality] in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause" (p. 28) and "that the ideas in me are like images which can easily fall short of the perfection of the things from which they are taken, but which cannot contain anything greater or more perfect" (p. 29). But I am finite and God is infinite and perfect, and "my perception of the infinite, that is God, is in some way prior to my perception of the finite, that is myself. For how could I understand that I doubted or desired---that is, lacked something---and that I was not wholly perfect, unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to recognize my own defects by comparison?" (p. 31). "So from what has been said it must be concluded that God necessarily exists." (p. 31).

This being the basis for all further knowledge. From the existence of God "I can see a way forward to the knowledge of other things" (p. 37), because "[God] cannot be a deceiver, since it is manifest by the natural light that all fraud and deception depend on some defect." (p. 35). "And since God does not wish to deceive me, he surely did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever enable me to go wrong while using it correctly." (pp. 37-38). What does it mean to use one's faculties "correctly"? "If ... I simply refrain from making a judgement in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error. But if in such cases I either affirm or deny, the I am not using my free will correctly ... since it is clear by the natural light that the perception of the intellect should always precede the determination of the will." (p. 41).

Proofs of the existence of corporeal things and "the distinction between the human soul and the body" (p. 12). "I do not see how God could be understood to be anything but a deceiver if the ideas [of corporeal things] were transmitted from a source other than corporeal things. It follows that corporeal things exist." (p. 55). Proof that the soul is not a corporeal thing: "On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it." (p. 54). Second proof: "There is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. ... This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body, even if I did not already know as much from other considerations." (p. 59).

Why it is a good thing that the latter proofs are so crappy. "The great benefit of these arguments [for the existence of corporeal things etc.] is not, in my view, that they prove what they establish---namely that there really is a world, and that human beings have bodies and so on---since no sane person has ever seriously doubted these things. The point is that in considering these arguments we come to realize that they are not so solid and as transparent as the arguments which lead us to knowledge of our own minds and of God, so that the latter are the most certain and evident of all possible objects of knowledge for the human intellect. Indeed, this is the one thing that I set myself to prove in these Meditations." (p. 11).

well..descartes is kind of long winded.

he's trying to prove we can KNOW things about the natural world, which he does. fantastic.

the problem now is by decartes standard can there be agnostic or atheist scientists?

I needed this book for my doctoral studies. I needed it for research and needed it quickly. I am very pleased with the delivery service and the book