Discourse on Method, And, Meditations on First Philosophy [Paperback]

Descartes 'Discourse on Method' is a fascinating text, combining the newly-invented form of essay (Descartes was familiar with the Essays of Montaigne) with the same kind of autobiographical impulse that underpins Augustine's Confessions. Descartes writes about his own form of mystical experience, seeing this as almost a kind of revelation that all past knowledge would be superseded, and all problems would eventually be solved by human intellect.

In the Discourse, Descartes formulates logical principles based on reason (which makes it somewhat ironic that this came to him almost as a revelation). Descartes had some appreciation for thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, but he thought that Bacon depended too much upon empirical data, and with Hobbes he disagreed on what would be the criteria for ascertaining certainty.

Descartes was a mathematician at heart, and perhaps had a carry-over of Pythagorean mystical attachment to mathematics, for his sense of reason led him to impute an absolute quality to mathematics; this has major implications for metaphysics and epistemology. Descartes method was a continuation in many ways of the ideas of Plato, Aristotle and the medieval thinkers, for they all tended toward thinking in absolute, universal terms in some degree.

Descartes in his first section discounts much of Scholasticism, stating that the only real absolutes are theology and mathematics; because theology is based upon revelation, it is therefore beyond reason, and thus, mathematics becomes the only rational truth. Descartes develops this idea further with rules of method, which include ideas of intuition, analysis and deduction. He uses some of his method to come up with his greatest proposition:

Cogito ergo sum - - I think, therefore I am

'The Cogito is a first principle from which Descartes will now deduce all that follows.' This permits Descartes to deal both with rational elements and empirical data.

The other major piece in this collection, 'The Meditations', includes several different mediations, including that on the existence of the soul, the existence of God, the material world, things we may doubt, and other philosophical problems of the time. These meditations do incorporate Descartes attempt to employ his method to some degree, but at the same time divert into other means. For example, Descartes' meditation on the existence of God is in many ways the Anselm ontological proof revisited, and has a certain circular reasoning to it.

This is an important text, one that I read the summer before I went to college, and makes a good study for those who wish to see the personal element in the development of philosophy.

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 edition also includes Descartes's Discourse on Method, which, though it isn't as important or philosophically sophisticated as the Meditations, is an essential text for understanding Descartes's conception of his own project. The book begins with interesting intellectual biography involving an account of his disillusionment with the intellectual culture of his time and of how this disillusionment led him to the project of finding a philosophical basis for a systematic scientific conception of the world. This is followed by a short presentation of an early version of the main lines of Descartes's philosophical argument that he would go on to develop in the Meditations. Then Descartes shows how he applied his method to discover a priori "solutions" to certain scientific problems. The Discourse, then, provides one with a better sense of Descartes's self-conception as a philosopher and the role he thought his philosophical system should play in the thinking of his times

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.