Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) (Paperback)

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.