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Socrates Meets Descartes: The Father of Philosophy Analyzes the Father of Modern Philosophy's Discourse on Method

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This is written in a dialog format between Descartes and Socrates. It is a great introduction to Discourse on Method. Kreeft makes it easy for those of us who don't have much of a background in philosophy to understand what Descartes was teaching and the errors it contained. I can't wait to read Kreeft's other books in this series!

René Descartes dies and goes to Purgatory. Socrates meets him there and interrogates him about his rationalist philosophy. For good measure, Blaise Pascal makes a cameo appearance at the end of the dialogue.

That is the hilarious setup for Peter Kreeft's excellent introduction to Descartes' Discourse on Method, which introductory philosophy students and interested laypeople can read for both fun and profit. Kreeft uses a similar setup for his introduction to other philosophers including Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, which is characterized by a "subjective turn" from metaphysics to epistemology. He wrote in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, a conflict that caused many to doubt the peace-making ability of religion and to seek that peace-making ability through rational inquiry divorced from religious authority. For Descartes that rational inquiry involved the application of a rationalistic method to philosophical investigation. The method began by doubting everything until an indubitable foundation of clear and distinct ideas was laid. For Descartes, the first such clear and distinct idea is cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."

From the indubitability of the knowing subject, Descartes went on to make a rational case for the existence of the mind distinct from the body, the existence of God, and the existence of the material world. Unfortunately, the cogito--at least the implications of the cogito--bequeathed to subsequent philosophy an unsolvable mind-body problem that has convinced many that Descartes' anthropology is fundamentally wrong. Moreover, far from settling debates, Descartes' rational method engendered only new debates.

The dialogue Kreeft crafts between Socrates and Descartes fairly lays out Descartes' the historical context and substance of Descartes' philosophy, acknowledges what it got right, demonstrates what it got wrong, and leaves open a number of debatable issues for the reader to decide on his or her own. Reading Kreeft on Descartes motivated me to go back and re-read Descartes, whom I first read as an undergraduate philosophy major. For me, an introduction that so motivates its readers has succeeded admirably.

I highly recommend Socrates Meets Descartes.

One time, a young student of Socrates asked the revered sage how one becomes wise. Socrates brought the pupil to a nearby pond and the two went in the water. Then, without warning, Socrates held the student's head under the water as the frenzied young man fought wildly. Finally, Socrates freed him. The young man struggled for breath, panted, and gulped. Socrates watched coolly and said, "When you desire wisdom with the same intensity that you desired to breathe, then nothing will impede you from getting it." And in this fifth volume in the series of philosophical volumes by Peter Kreeft, the author employs Socrates to cross-examine an assortment of notable philosophers and thinkers (including Christ, Kant, Marx, Sarte, Machiavelli, and Plato) to assist the reader in gaining wisdom.

In this erudite yet accessible volume, Kreeft believes that Socrates and his interviewee Descartes are conceivably two of most significant philosophers in history inasmuch as they made a lasting impact on all the great philosophers who followed them: the ancient Greek and the one who helped birth modern philosophy.

Descartes famously said:"I think therefore I am." Nevertheless he also opined that "Everything is self-evident." Thus Socrates has many places to initiate his Socratic method in his dialogue with Descartes.

This fascinating and readable volume is reflective, insightful, and produces contemplation and enjoyment. "Socrates Meets" is a good text to help stimulate an interest in epistemology as well as general philosophy.

Descartes mused: "Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."

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This is another of Peter Kreeft's "Socrates meets" series, and it is both good and important. Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, so any one interested in the history of philosophy should find this book interesting. Although I've read Descartes' "Meditations", I was not familiar with the metaphysical flaws brought up by Kreeft in this book or the errors in Descartes' proofs of God. And, though the subject is philosophy, Kreeft's style is very easy reading, and the questions he raises are only suggestive and not bogged down with highly technical arguments. I especially recommend this book for anyone interested in "Socrates meets Kant", because several of the questions raised in this book are mentioned but not explained in that book.

Kreeft's latest entry in his Socrates Meets ... series got my hopes up. For better or worse, the way 21st Century westerners look at the world is very much the product of Descartes' philosophy.

And that makes it unfortunate that, every time a critical topic is broached, it gets sidelined after a few paragraphs with an admonition to the interested reader to pursue it further--with no suggestions for further reading given anywhere in the book. (Sort of. Kreeft does mention Pascal's Pensées several times, including the very end of the book. The Pensées present an alternative viewpoint, but Pascal does not present counter-arguments in direct response to Descartes' claims.)

On the bright side, Kreeft is far more sympathetic to Descartes than he was to any of the other philosophers in the series (Marx, Machiavelli, Sartre), leading to a much less abrasive tone to the book. Perhaps it is this very sympathy that leads him to venture into deeper waters, only to back out just when the topic gets interesting.

I'd be very interested to see a longer treatment from Dr. Kreeft. As it is, the book isn't a waste of time, but it could have been so much more. At the very least, it cries out for a "suggestions for further reading" section.

I first encountered Peter Kreeft's Socrates books in college, when a friend recommended The Unaborted Socrates. That book, along with Kreeft's Socrates Meets Jesus and The Best Things in Life, quite literally changed my life. So I was excited when I discovered only recently that Kreeft that taken his resurrected Socrates idea further, writing a series in which Socrates questions the great philosophers somewhere beyond the grave. Finding this book was also fortuitous because I was in the middle of another book--a difficult history of Western philosophy--when I realized that I needed a crash course on Cartesian philosophy. Fast. This book met that need, and then some.

The premise is simple--the book opens with Descartes coming to his senses while riding a horse through a strange land. He meets Socrates, who explains that this place is Heaven for himself but only Purgatory for Descartes. And the purgation required in Descartes's Purgatory is an interview with Socrates about his book A Discourse on Method. This quick setup leads into the bulk of the book, in which Socrates engages in his famous logical dialogue as he and Descartes read through the book in question.

Kreeft does an excellent job of not only presenting Descartes's ideas, but establishing the historical context in which Descartes wrote--and to which he was responding--and the historical impact of those writings. He examines the pros (a few of them) and cons (a ton of them) in Descartes's Method, pointing out the self-contradicting assumptions Descartes made when trying to create a new philosophy "without any assumptions." The dialogue and the examination of the ideas is so well-constructed that it is actually moving to read (Kreeft's fictional) Descartes as he realizes the unsolvable flaws of his ideas and the terrible results he inadvertently spawned.

The only problems I had with the book were mostly matters of comparison with Kreeft's other Socratic dialogues, the books that made such a difference to me in college. Unlike Socrates Meets Jesus and The Best Things in Life, Socrates Meets Descartes doesn't always offer watertight logical answers to some of Descartes's ideas, due primarily to the immense complexity of the ideas themselves. Socrates instead points out contradictions and logical fallacies, which are myriad in Descartes's book but not the definitive death-blows I expected. For the same reasons--the Method's complexity--a lot of tangents are also left hanging, but I can understand streamlining. Ultimately, Descartes's realization that his Method was flawed from the beginning also felt like a letdown, not just because of Kreeft's wonderful empathy with Descartes but because, as I said, there is no final duel of ideas--Socrates points out flaws in Descartes's philosophical foundation and, when the house built upon it collapses, it proves he was right all along.

So much for my minor objections. Not only was this a very good introduction to Descartes's ideas, it was a quick one. I read this book in a few short sittings over half a week. And as others have pointed out, it was also funny. A great strength of Kreeft's writing, one I remember vividly from reading those books as an undergrad, is his wit, and this book is liberally sprinkled with humor. That makes this good book not only enlightening, but a pleasure to read.

Recommended.