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Meditations on First Philosophy

Meditationes de prima philosophia

René Descartes · 1641 · Short (under 150 pages)

4.3 from 3 reviews

Knowledge & beliefModern EuropeanRationalism
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What it is

Six short meditations, written in Latin and published with objections from other thinkers and Descartes's replies. The First Meditation sets out reasons to doubt everything, from the unreliability of the senses to the possibility of dreaming and of a deceiving demon. The Second finds one certainty, that he exists as long as he is thinking, and uses a piece of wax to argue that the mind is known better than the body. The Third argues that God exists because the idea of an infinite being could only come from such a being, and the Fourth explains error as the will outrunning the intellect. The Fifth offers an ontological argument, and the Sixth argues that mind and body are distinct and that the material world exists.

Why read it

It shaped the problems of modern philosophy, from scepticism and the mind-body problem to the search for secure foundations for knowledge.

Where to start

Read the first two meditations in one sitting, then decide whether to read the Objections and Replies to see how his contemporaries pushed back.

Original text in the public domain; free translations exist online Read a 1680 English translation free at Project Gutenberg

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Reviews

  1. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    As someone who builds machine learning systems, I find the First Meditation oddly familiar: how do you know your inputs are not systematically corrupted? The evil demon is basically an adversarial attack. The later meditations are weaker for me, especially the proofs of God, but the first two are perfect philosophy.

  2. Priya Raghavan

    The wax example in the Second Meditation is the part I teach to perception students. Descartes argues that we judge the wax to be the same thing by understanding, not by sight. I think he is wrong, but wrong in a way that clarifies the problem.

  3. Tomasz Szewczak

    Read the Objections and Replies, not just the six meditations. Arnauld's point about the circle between clear and distinct ideas and God's existence is sharper than most modern critiques, and Descartes's reply is revealing. Hobbes and Gassendi are worth reading too, if only for the bad temper.