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Descartes occupies a position of piviotal importance as one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy; he is, perhaps the most widely studied of all philosophers.In this authoritative collection an international team of leading scholars in Cartesian studies present the full range of Descartes' extraordinary philosophical achievement.His life and the development of his thought, as well as the intellectual background to and reception of his work are treated at length.At the core of the volume are a group of chapters on his metaphysics: the celebrated "Cogito" argument, the proofs of God's existence, the "Cartesian circle" and the dualistic theory of the mind and its relation to his theological and scientific views.Other chapters cover the philosophical implications of his work in algebra, his place in the 17th century scientific revolution, the structure of his physics, and his work on physiology and psychology.Amazon.com Review
"Descartes is still rightly called the father of modernphilosophy," John Cottingham explains in his introduction to TheCambridge Companion to Descartes, for "without Descartes'sphilosophy, the very shape of the problems with which we stillwrestle, about knowledge and science, subjectivity and reality, matterand consciousness, would have been profoundly different." Thus it isnot only the philosophy of Descartes that is illuminated by the 14essays contained herein, but also the philosophical predicament oftoday.

The contributors are among the most eminent scholars of Descartes'sphilosophy, including Cottingham, Roger Ariew, and Stephen Gaukroger(whose biography ofDescartes should not be missed). Not all of the essays discussDescartes's philosophy, however. Indeed, as Daniel Garber remarks, "inthe seventeenth century Descartes was at very least equally well knownfor his mechanistic physics" as for any of his philosophicalwritings. The essays on his scientific work in algebra, psychology,and physiology are also fascinating. Still, at the heart of theCompanion are the essays on Descartes's metaphysics. PeterMarkie's careful discussion of the most famous sentence inphilosophy--"cogito ergo sum"--is especially rewarding. Alsoworthwhile is Louis E. Loeb's thoughtful exploration of the Cartesiancircle, which Descartes raises in his Meditations by arguingfrom God's existence to the trustworthiness of clear and distinctbeliefs while also relying on the trustworthiness of such beliefs inorder to prove that God exists. --Glenn Branch ... Read more

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Good introduction to Descartes
Descartes is rightly considered as one of the greatest philosophers of all time.While his thought is subtle and nuanced, his new approach to Philosophy brought about a massive change in the direction of the subject and helped decisively end the medieval synthesis and worldview amoung serious philosophers.

This volume contains a series of essays on Descartes by leading experts on Descartes, including John Cottingham.As with the other Cambridge Volumes the bias is towards an analytical interpretation of Descartes, which mostly rejects his dualism as essentially meaningless.Nevertheless, the approach to modern philosophical issues in both the continent and the Anglo-American tradition were very much framed by the sorts of questions posed by Descartes, and his thought repays close and careful study.This volume will help students of Descartes in their quest to understand the thought of this pivotal thinker.

Very interesting reading
Many of the books about Descartes do not achieve the depth that this book reaches. The contributors, from considering the antecedents of the Cartesian thought, analyze the most algid points in Descartes' philosophy,such as the Cogito, the Cartesian circle and his physics; the contributorsalso show the influence of Descartes' work in the context of his own epochand his legacy for later centuries. I am sure that the purchase of thisbook will grant the reader a deeper vision of modernity; it also will beuseful in the understanding of many contemporary philosophal tendencies. ... Read more

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French-language version of "Discours de la methode" by Rene Descartes. ... Read more

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Is knowledge possible? If so, what can we know and how do we come to know it? What degree of certainty does our knowledge enjoy? In these two powerful works, Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher considered to be the father of modern philosophy, outlines his philosophical method and then counters the sceptics of his time by insisting that certain knowledge can be had. He goes on to address the nature and extent of human knowledge, the distinction between mind and body, the existence of God, and the existence of external objects. ... Read more

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I think therefore I read...
Rene Descartes is often considered the founding father of modern philosophy.A true Renaissance man, he studied Scholastic philosophy and physics as a student, spent time as a volunteer soldier and traveler throughout Europe, studied mathematics, appreciated the arts, and became a noted correspondent with royals and intellectual figures throughout the continent.He died in Sweden while on assignment as tutor to the Queen, Christiana.

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.

a brilliant mind at work
Descartes has written one of the greatest classics in the history of philosophy.He gets down to the elements of how we can know truth.This is in sharp contrast to the majority of philosophy books that give another mans opinion, but not on how we know truth.Descartes begins his book by saying that there are contrary opinions among philosophers, other people and just in general.For every opinion given there is a contrary opinion, so how do we know truth, if knowing truth is even possible?He writes in his book, that what we know as the world ,could be the creation of a demon who fools us into thinking that what we know is real.So he writes that one should doubt everything.Then he says that someone is doubting, so there must be something real that is doubting.Hence he arrives at his famous self evident principle "I think, therefore I am."He then states that we begin our search for truth on self evident principles such as "Truth exists" and his principle stated above among others. We divide our problem and solve it starting from the easiest to the most difficult.As a final step we take in all the evidence into review.This is an excellent method in which to find truth.His first step though is the most important one, that is, establishing doubt.We can't really know what a thing is and hence we should be doubtful.This is a far better method than the scientific method and far easier to implement.Science does not and cannot arrive at truth, because truth is eternal and has no limit.The most science can do is to have a utility value.That is it can make life easier for us by mastering nature.To find truth we leave that to the religions such as Christianity and Buddhism and also to the philosophers like Descartes.

This book is absolutly inspiring
Great book, go buy it! Descartes is one the true geniuses of this worl ... Read more

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A superb text for teaching the philosophy of Descartes, this volume includes all his major works in their entirety, important selections from his lesser known writings, and key selections from his philosophical correspondence. The result is an anthology that enables the reader to understand the development of Descartes-s thought over his lifetime. Includes a biographical Introduction, chronology, bibliography, and index. ... Read more

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The Best Introductory Edition of Descartes' Writings
Roger Ariew and Hackett Publishing have brought out a terrific edition of Descartes' writings, superior to the one published by Cambridge University Press for several reasons. First, the typeface in the Cambridge edition is not very clear--it almost looks like the pages have been photocopied.

Second, the Hackett edition not only has Descartes' important philosophical works, but also includes a fine selection from Descartes' minor writings and correspondence (since Cambridge also publishes the complete writings of Descartes, they're not particularly motivated to do something like this). One finds, e.g., Descartes' 1640 letter to Colvius regarding the 'cogito ergo sum' argument found in Augustine's City of God, as well as two very important letters to the Marquis of Newcastle and Henry More regarding the question of whether animals have souls and whether space is infinite and vacuums are possible.

All selections are arranged chronologically, and Ariew has written a helpful introduction. Numbers in the page margins correlate each selection to the place where it is found in the standard original language edition of Descartes' works (Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. Adam and Tannery, 2nd ed., Paris: 1964-74). This is THE introductory edition to get.

Good edition.
The philosophy of Descartes is not the most iron-clad of arguments.He bases almost all of his major conclusions on certain facts that are far from given.For instance, his proof that material things exist depends totally on the fact that God exists.While he does offer 2 proofs that God exists, the arguments are flawed.One is an argument that had been offered hundreds of years before, and was deemed flawed even then.The other just plain doesn't work.

But his philosophy did help bring about the skepticism of "Is this all real?What if it's just a dream, or a hallucination?".That in itself makes this book a good read.

This edition is rather nice, having a wide range of writings from Descartes, including the most famous, the Meditations with criticisms and responses. ... Read more

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Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy written by legendary author Rene Descartes is a philosophical and mathematical treatise which is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by Rene Descartes is highly recommended. Published by Classic Books America and beautifully produced, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library ... Read more

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Descartes' Discourse on the Limits of the Individual Reasoner
In the "Discourse on Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Searching for Truth in the Sciences" (1637) Descartes suggests that perfect knowledge can be achieved by means of perfect, individual reasoning.According to Descartes, reason can only guarantee its truth-seeking value in the personal sphere, and even then only when it is gradually and systematically applied.Descartes demonstrates his own method for generating perfectly reasoned knowledge, but it is the model of this behavior and not the knowledge itself that ought benefit his readers.The text is in this sense a testament to Descartes' own progress as a practitioner of his own method.Descartes exerts himself as the ultimate critic whose default stance is one of doubt and who wishes to reform his own thought according to the most rigorous standards of reason possible.He does not succeed in following most of his maxims.Nevertheless, his experiment is a notable instance of the struggle for individual enlightenment.

First, Descartes addresses the harms of the status quo organization of knowledge and its acquisition.He identifies the vector by which falsehoods propagate themselves undetected among the disciplines of human knowledge.The current realm of human knowledge is the product of "design by committee" in the sense that it is cumulative and collaborative, meaning that previous errors in reasoning may serve as the ostensibly firm foundations for the current order of knowledge.He alleges that no discipline of knowledge can be said to be entirely reasoned from empirical data.He criticizes even the apparently objective systems of mathematics and logic for a deficiency of application.Descartes points to controversies and inconsistencies between disciplines as evidence of imperfection among the sciences, for if they were perfectly conceived, they would be a single and uniform science.In theory, these unstable foundations could be reformed at the individual level with individual reason alone.

To this end, Descartes performs his own experiment, isolating himself from the order of human knowledge to the best of his ability.He recommends that the individual reasoner enter a knowledge vacuum that is void of the mental constructs with which other humans think.Like Bacon, Descartes wishes to distance himself from the logic of syllogism and abandon the "Idols of the Theater."Starting from a single absolutely true concept, if one can reason it out, one might gradually construct knowledge by the sole mechanism of pure reasoning, resulting in trustworthy and verified blocks of knowledge which have been thought out by the individual reasoner and which ideally have empirical evidence in the world.Descartes performs this role to demonstrate the solvency of the method to himself.His first building block is perhaps the first warning signal with regard to the rest of his project, but it is also one of the only reasoning sessions to which the readers have detailed access.Descartes falls short even at this primary stage because he is unable to achieve a point zero of knowledge from which to start.Beyond this, it is evident from Descartes own writing that his "good sense" frequently makes reasoned but unreasonable leaps.Indeed, readers may only ponder the interim years in which Descartes moved from his starting point of "I think therefore I am" to his much more specific "knowledge" concerning the heart.Descartes' task of operating solely by means of individual reason is both impossible and inadvisable.Furthermore, his project is a performative contradiction: the notion of individual reason opposes the adoption of collectively achieved knowledge, yet the text serves the very purpose of intruding upon the reader's individual sphere of reason.But, for all of this project's weaknesses in practice, Descartes' project shifts the responsibility and procedure of enlightenment away from the elite class of thinkers into the domain of the autonomous reasoner.

Discourse on Method by René Descartes
The Discourse on the Method by René Descartes that has intrigued me for some time, once I took the time to read it twice I realized why. It forms the philosophical base for all forms of exploration of knowledge. The work at times it appears to be full of riddles (enthymemes) that draws the reader to common sense conclusions applicable in real life problems. ... Read more

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Descartes' ideas not only changed the course of Western philosophy but also led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics and mathematics, political theory and ethics. This text presents Descartes' two major works. ... Read more

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Exceptional depth and range
Usually, philosophy books speak only to academic philosophers.This one shows Descartes' influence in a wide range of domains, including math and science, ethics and politics, psychology, and literature and the arts. The nine essays that complement Descartes' texts (the Discourse and Meditations) are accessible, but deeply informed. They have little or no competition.The translation is classic and clean, not fussy. This is not the last word on Descartes.Professorial competition guarantees many more. But this book is both scholarly and provocative.

Poor translation
The negative nature of this review reflects upon this particular translation of Descartes' seminal work, not upon the content of the work itself. The edition in question (ISBN: 0330067739), published by Yale University Press and edited by David Weissman, utilizes a translation rendered originally for Cambridge University Press in 1911. Unfortunately, this translation does much to obfuscate a work that should help enlighten.

The saving grace of this edition is that 3/4's of the book consists of nine separate essays, many of which are excellent, that review a broad spectrum of topics pertaining to Descartes and his ideas.

I recommend that you buy this book for the excellent supplementary materials, but look elsewhere for a modern translation (i.e. the John Cottingham translation in the 'new' Cambridge Philosophy series). ... Read more

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A reprint of the Bobbs-Merrill edition of 1965.

This volume preserves the format in which Discourse on Method was originally published: as a preface to Descartes's writings on optics, geometry, and meteorology. In his introduction, Olscamp discusses the value of reading the Discourse alongside these three works, which sheds new light on Descartes's method. Includes an updated bibliography. ... Read more

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Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology
This is the beggining of modern philosopy and mathematics ... Read more

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Descartes is perhaps best known for his statement, "Cogito, ergo sum," the cornerstone of his metaphysics. But he did not intend the metaphysics to stand apart from his scientific work, which included important investigations into physics, mathematics, and optics. In this book, Sorell shows that Descarates was, above all, an advocate and practitioner of the new mathematical approach to physics, and that he developed his philosophies to support his discoveries in the sciences. ... Read more

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An adequate and balanced if somewhat bland introduction to Descartes
I previously had read Tom Sorrell's book on Hobbes and had very much enjoyed that.I learned a great deal from it and was impressed by its depth and range.I did not learn nearly as much from this book.It is not that the book is misconceived or poorly informed.It is simply not as well executed as his Hobbes book.It isn't a question of length.There is an absolutely outstanding introductory book on Descartes by John Cottingham, perhaps the top English language Descartes scholar of our time, Descartes, that is both enormously informative and exceptionally well written.I found this short book by Sorrell to be wide-ranging but opaque, and less illuminating on various ideas and concepts than I would have liked.If it weren't for the hefty price of the Cottingham book, I would strongly recommend it over this one.

The strong point of this book is that it takes a balanced approach to Descartes's philosophy.Many books on Descartes emphasize the philosophy over the scientific to such a degree that it drops out of consideration as an issue.Some undergraduates, having read the MEDITATIONS in a freshmen philosophy class, are unaware of Descartes's importance as a mathematician or physicist.Sorrell does an excellent job of placing all of Descartes's though within his scientific agenda.Descartes was not a philosopher who dabbled with science, but a scientific theoretician who was forced to metaphysical reflections.Though Sorrell is clear on noting that physicists and scientists did not exist as such; what we would call scientists were at the time known as natural philosophers.The problem with the book is not the breadth; that is actually its strength.The problem is the lack of clarity in the details.Too many concepts are mentioned in their contexts, without fully explaining that context.Because I've read a good deal on Descartes (actually, two graduate level courses on his work), I kept thinking that this was missing here or that lacking there.

The one thing that I found did regret in setting the overall context of Descartes work was the degree to which it was driven by theological concerns.Descartes was, as Sorrell points out, a critic of the Scholastic school that dominated Catholic education at the time.Descartes saw himself as opposing the Aristotelianism embedded in Scholastic (Thomist) thought by resurrecting Augustinian (hence, Platonic) thought.So when I say that Sorrell is good as setting the context of Descartes's thought, it was in terms of his scientific goals.Like many Decartes scholars, Sorrell neglects the theological side of his work, though it has been dealt with more thoroughly in the past couple of decades by several French and a few English-language scholars.Still, it is a book worth reading, though if you have the money or access via a library to the Cottingham book I noted above, I would recommend that instead.

Clear, Informative Introduction to Descartes
This is an enjoyable and informative introduction to Descartes, his work, and his philosophy. Some may hesitate to delve into Descartes work because of its complexity and denseness of thought, but this "very short introduction" comes to the rescue, orienting us to Descartes' major ideas, their developmental history, and the context in which he developed them. The book is greatly interesting to read, and even the discourses on some of Descartes' more conceptual thought are treated with exceptional clarity. Although the book focuses on the developmental history of Descartes' investigation into the sciences (particularly in optics), the book also discusses his contributions to mathematical geometry, as well as some of his thoughts on faith and reason. If you are looking for an introduction to Descartes, it is hard to go wrong with this well-written and enjoyable pocket volume.

The Ghost of Descartes is still with us
Descartes is one of the most influential Western philosophers, and this book is a useful first introduction to his life and ideas. The strength of the book is in positioning Descartes' writing primarily within the political and ideological currents of his time, and showing how exactly he's been forced to edit and finesse his writings in order to please the censorship and his critics. This helps explain why some of his works were not as straightforwardly written as one might have liked. The other reason has probably to do with the sheer ambition of Descartes' chief enterprise, to discover one sure method of arriving at explanations and solutions of the most pressing scientific and philosophical problems of the time. The enormity of this scope meant that some of these methods would necessarily be to vague to be of any practical use in mathematics or physics, and within a generation after Descartes' death Newtonian gravitation completely prevailed. However, in the realm of philosophy, Descarts' thought managed to be of interest until the present day.

This book is very well written, and if you are interested in finding out more about Descartes, it would be a worthwhile first read.

Useful for novices and advanced students alike.
Those who have not yet studied Descartes will enjoy this clearly written introduction to Descartes' life and thought. However, even seasoned philosophy students are also liable to find much of interest in Sorell's DESCARTES. For most philosophy students, Descartes is more or less synonymous with the DISCOURSE ON METHOD and the MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY, and Descartes' scientific and mathematical work tend to be regarded as almost irrelevant and disconnected afterthoughts. The brilliance of Sorell's book is to show how Descartes' work constitutes an integrated whole, where the DISCOURSE and the MEDITATIONS are more a preliminary step in Descartes' project than the endpoint of his philosophy that we often take it to be. ... Read more

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I think, therefore I read...
Rene Descartes is often considered the founding father of modern philosophy. A true Renaissance man, he studied Scholastic philosophy and physics as a student, spent time as a volunteer soldier and traveler throughout Europe, studied mathematics, appreciated the arts, and became a noted correspondent with royals and intellectual figures throughout the continent. He died in Sweden while on assignment as tutor to the Queen, Christiana.

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.

This is an important text; the 'Discourse on Method' is 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.

Great Philosophy in a Not-So-Great Edition
There is no question that this book contains great philosophy, but I have some misgivings about the translation here.It's not just that the translation of the Meditations often seems somewhat misleading in the details that are likely to concern serious readers of this work, but that Lafleur's decision to translate various editions of the Meditations and to run them together wasn't a very wise one.Not only does it make the book somewhat harder to read than it should be, but it's questionable whether this provides one with an accurate picture of Descartes's thought.This is an especially important concern since one of the three editions of Descartes's Meditations on which Lafleur relies is a French translation of the Meditations that Descartes approved for publication.To the best of my knowledge, it's not know just how closely Descartes read this text before giving it his approval.So relying on it in providing a translation of the work seems pretty dubious to me.(To his credit, Lafleur makes clear where he's providing material from each translation and he relies on Descartes's original Latin edition as the basic text.Material from the other editions is added in brackets.)Also, the book has a very out-of-date bibliography, one that doesn't appear to have been updated since the translation was first published in the 50s.

That said, there is great philosophy on display here.Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the few works of philosophy that absolutely every educated person needs to read at least once.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.And don't worry:it shouldn't take you more than an afternoon to read through it.But you can, of course, spend the remainder of your life thinking about the ideas contained in this work.

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.

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.So the Meditations is a work of value to both newcomers to philosophy and to those with a great deal of philosophical background.

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.

The primary benefit of purchasing this translation of Descartes is that it's quite cheap.It's an adequate edition of the Meditations and the Discourse for students, and I'm sure it's fine for the average reader. ... Read more

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A major contribution to Descartes studies, this book provides a panorama of cutting-edge scholarship ranging widely over Descartes's own primary concerns: metaphysics, physics, and its applications.It is at once a tool for scholars and--steering clear of technical Cartesian science--an accessible resource that will delight nonspecialists.The contributors include Edwin Curley, Willis Doney, Alan Gabbey, Daniel Garber, Marjorie Grene, Gary Hatfield, Marleen Rozemond, John Schuster, Dennis Sepper, Stephen Voss, Stephen Wagner, Margaret Welson, Jean Marie Beyssade, Michelle Beyssade, Michel Henry, Evert van Leeuwen, Jean-Luc Marion, Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, and Jean-Pierre Seris. Combining new textual sensitivity with attentiveness to history, they represent the best established scholars and most exciting new voices, including both English speaking and newly-translated writers.Part I examines the foundations of Descartes's philosophy: Cartesian certainty; the phenomenology of the cogito and its modulations in the passions; and the defensibility and comprehensibility of the Cartesian God.The second part examines Descartes's groundbreaking metaphysics: mind's distinctness from and interaction with body; imagination; perception; and language.Part III examines Cartesian science:the revolutionary rhetoric of the Rules and the Discourse; the metaphysical foundations of physics; the interplay of rationalism and empiricism; the mechanics and human biology that flow from Descartes's physics. ... Read more

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Descartes' Discourse marks a watershed in European thought; in it, the author sets out in brief his radical new philosophy, which begins with a proof of the existence of the self (the famous "cogito ergo sum").Next he deduces from it the existence and nature of God, and ends by offering a radical new account of the physical world and of human and animal nature.Written in everyday language and meant to be read by common people of the day, it swept away all previous philosophical traditions.
This new translation is an ideal introduction to Descartes for the general reader. It is accompanied by a substantial introductory essay from Renaissance scholar Ian Maclean that is designed to provide in-depth historical and philosophical context. The essay draws on Descartes' correspondence to examine what brought him to write his great work, and the impact it had on his contemporaries.A detailed section of notes explain Descartes' philosophical terminology and ideas, as well as historical references and allusions. Any reader can feel comfortable diving in to this classic work of Renaissance philosophical thought. ... Read more

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Cogito Cogito ergo Cogito Sum
Ambrose Bierce said that the title of this review is as close to certainty as any philosopher can get.Descartes, of course, thought he got a lot closer than that.Two things are certain about this edition of his "Discourse." 1.They got the title right.Most editions call it "Discourse on Method."Descartes thought he had the only method, therefore he titled his work "Discourse on THE Method."2. A tremendous amount of scholarship was devoted to this edition.The introduction is longer than the text, and the work is heavily annotated.

Descartes' work consists of six parts, which can be summarized thus:

Part 1:Descartes echoes the opening chapters of Ecclesiastes in lamenting that learning and worldly experience are empty.He then says that when he achieved this realization, he devoted himself to introspection.

Part 2:He outlines his method of introspection as follows: 1.Accept nothing that is not incontrovertible.2.Break large problems down into their component parts.3.Solve the easier components before tackling the more complex components.4.Be careful to be thorough in your assessment of the problem.

Part 3:He outlines his plan for a life of virtue:1. Obey the laws of God and man, but do so in moderation.2.Be firm and resolute in your actions, whether right or wrong.He would have approved of my high school football coach, who taught us, "If you're going to make a mistake, make it at full speed."3.Master yourself, not your circumstances.4.Pursue the best of occupations.Descartes decided that the best of occupations was that of the curious idler.He formulated these maxims at age 23 and spent the next 9 years idling curiously and introspecting.

Part 4:The core of the work.Here Descartes begins by rejecting as untrue everything that he has ever been taught.Assuming that as a given, what can he know for a fact?"I think, therefore I am."From this dictum he deduces the the existence and immortality of the human soul, the existence and nature of God, and the nature of reality.His proof of God's existence reminds one of St. Anselm's ontological proof of God.

Parts 5 & 6:The weakest part of the work.Here Descartes describes a book he wrote in which he solved all the problems of the universe.He then explains that he decided not to publish it because somebody might find mistakes in it.If his description of how the heart works is any indication of the accuracy of the rest of his book, he was quite correct that mistakes would be found by others.He then talks about other books he actually published more or less at the same time as this work.

Parts 1-3 seem somewhat trite and arrogant.Parts 5 & 6 reveal a man whose ego cannot stand being shown to be wrong.Part 4 is brilliant and worth the tedium of the rest of the book. ... Read more

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In this new introduction to the life, thought and works of one of the greatest seventeenth-century philosophers, John Cottingham aims to place Descartes' ideas in their historical context while at the same time showing how they relate to a network of philosophical problems that are still vigorously debated today.

Separate chapters are devoted to Descartes' life and the intellectual climate of his times; the Cartesian method; the reconstruction of knowledge from self to God and to the external world; Descartes' theory of the material universe; his account of mind and body; and his psychology and theory of the will and passions.

While doing justice to the complexities of Descartes' thought, the book presupposes no philosophical training, and all technical philosophical notions are explained in such a way as to be intelligible to the first-year student or general reader. ... Read more

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Descartes book
My daughter needed this book for a college course.The books arrived promptly and in excellent condition. ... Read more

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Ren Descartes was the founding father of modern Western philosophy and a pivotal thinker in the history of this fascinating subject. The history of philosophy since his time cannot be adequately understood without appreciating how Descartes changed our thinking on a huge range of philosophical issues. Covering all the key concepts of his work, Starting with Descartes provides an accessible introduction to the ideas of this enormously significant philosopher. Thematically structured, the book leads the reader through a thorough overview of the development of Descartes' thought, resulting in a more complete understanding of the roots of his philosophical concerns. Offering coverage of the full range of Descartes' ideas, the book explores his major work The Meditations on First Philosophy and his basic methodology of philosophical questioning. Crucially the book introduces the historical context in which Descartes wrote and the major thinkers whose work proved influential in the development of his thought, as well as those he influenced. This is the ideal introduction for anyone coming to the work of this pivotally important thinker for the first time. ... Read more

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Descartes'Meditations on First Philosophy has proven to be not only one of the canonical texts of Western philosophy, but also the site of a great deal of interpretive activity in scholarship on the history of early modern philosophy over the last two decades.David Cunning's monograph proposes a new interpretation, which is that from beginning to end the reasoning of the Meditations is the first-person reasoning of a thinker who starts from a confused non-Cartesian paradigm and moves slowly and awkwardly toward a grasp of just a few of the central theses of Descartes' system. The meditator of the Meditationsis not a full-blown Cartesian at the start or middle or even the end of inquiry, and accordingly the Meditations is riddled with confusions throughout.Cunning argues that Descartes is trying to capture the kind of reasoning that a non-Cartesian would have to engage in to make the relevant epistemic progress, and that the Meditationsrhetorically models that reasoning.He proposes that Descartes is reflecting on what happens in philosophical inquiry: we are unclear about something, we roam about using our existing concepts and intuitions, we abandon or revise some of these, and then eventually we come to see a result as clear that we did not see as clear before.Thus Cunning's fundamental insight is that Descartes is a teacher, and the reader a student.With that reading in mind, a significant number of the interpretive problems that arise in the Descartes literature dissolve when we make a distinction between the Cartesian and non-Cartesian elements of the Meditations, and a better understanding of surrounding texts is achieved as well.This important volume will be of great interest to scholars of early modern philosophy. ... Read more

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Wonderful new approach to Descartes.
Professor Cunning has a wonderful and thoughtful new approach to thinking about and understanding Descartes' Meditations. This should be a "must read" for all scolars and philosophy students as well! ... Read more

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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Scientist, mathematician, traveller, soldier - and spy - Rene Descartes has been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. Born in 1596 into an era still dominated by the medieval mindset, he was one of the chief actors in the riveting drama that ushered in the modern world. His life coincided with an extraordinarily significant time in history - the first half of the miraculous seventeenth century, replete with genius in the arts and sciences, and wracked by civil and international conflicts across Europe. Before his death in 1650, Descartes made immense contributions to an exceptionally wide range of fields and disciplines, and his assertion 'Cogito, ergo sum' ('I think, therefore I am') has become one of the most famous maxims in all philosophy. He was the very archetype of a 'Renaissance man', and yet surprisingly little is known about him. Drawing on new research and his own insights as one of our leading philosophers, A. C. Grayling presents a stunningly accessible and fascinating portrait of the man and the remarkable era in which he lived. ... Read more

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Engaging biography of the man
Grayling's account of the life of Descartes is an engaging and accessible read. If anything, it is a little too short and light, and left me wanting more. As a professional philosopher, Grayling is well placed to treat of Descartes' contribution to Western thought, but he eschews deep technical analysis in favour of true biography - an account of the events of Descartes' outward life. An interesting life it appears to have been, as well. Set against the events of the Reformation and the 30 Years' War, Grayling makes the intriguing suggestion that Descartes, Jesuit-educated and a Catholic to the end, was for part of his life travelling as a Jesuit spy. This is not as dramatic as it may sound, as any multilingual and educated person of the time might have been called upon to provide intelligence about countries he passed through at the time. Descartes was certainly involved with the military and present at the Battle of White Mountain, very roughly contemporaneous with the Defenestration. At any rate, the question adds an air of mystery and adventure which engages the reader's attention.

This was an interesting review of the legacy of a thinker whose name I knew well while studying sciences at school and university. I found it useful to be reminded all these years later of the range of his contributions. Reading Damasio on cognition I had come to focus on Descartes' name as the heuristic for an error - Cartesian Dualism, the long-discredited notion that the mind and the body are of different stuff, one mechanistic and the other a ghost, or "soul", in the mechanism. Of course, his contribution to our thought was greater by far and he is one of the pivotal philosophers and mathematicians of early modernity. Not for nothing do we plot most of our graphs using "Cartesian" coordinates. Without Descartes' approach of reducing our reasoning to only that which absolutely cannot be doubted - "Cogito ergo sum" - could the modern conception of scepticism, or even the Scientific Revolution itself, have taken the shape they did? Perhaps the idea was in the air and would have emerged anyway, but it was Descartes who formalised and published it. Could the idea of understanding reality only in terms of naturalistic processes have been wrested from the grip of the religious establishment without him? In the context of the Reformation, perhaps this was inevitable, but it was Descartes who formulated the idea so as not to threaten orthodoxy and provoke a backlash. (Ironically, given the outcome.) He is one of the architects of the modern mind.

Descartes life took him to all the key countries of Reformation Europe save Spain and Poland, as far as I can ascertain. He lived for some time on what must have seemed enemy territory, in Reformed Amsterdam. As a result of his sympathies, probably, he avoided his native France for much of his life, perhaps exiled as a persona non grata. At the end, his great works behind him and on the search for royal preferment, he travelled to Sweden and the court of Christina. There, in unaccustomed cold and required to rise at 5 AM in contradiction of his lifetime habits, he caught a fever and died at the all-too-young age of 54. Christina converted to Catholicism and abdicated soon after, possibly a last legacy of the great thinker.

Grayling is sufficiently sympathetic to convey sorrow at this end to a life of achievements, but does not elide Descartes' somewhat difficult character. I appreciated his balance here, as it is tempting for a biographer to become partisan and Grayling adroitly evades this trap. Descartes was quick to take offence at differences of opinion and seems to have been a bitter and rather vindictive party to such disputes. One might choose to offer him some slack on account of his genius, but this aspect of his character cannot be denied. It is a flaw, and not a particularly humanising one. Grayling simply gives an account of the exchanges and makes no apology.

All in all, this was a great life and Graylings is a fine introduction. Quickly and easily readable and quite non-technical, with a hint of the mystery novel about it. ... Read more

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This accessible supplement makes Descartes' text come alive for students by showing them how to read, think critically, and write about this key, classic work. Engaging interactive devices draw students into an intimate philosophical encounter that they can model in later work in philosophy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

review
well put together and the outline of questions would be most beneficial to a young reader rather than an older reader.

More than Descartes' text
I am the instructor of a college course in which we read Descartes' Meditations.I ordered this edition because I wanted to use the Rubin translation that also appears in the Perry/Bratman anthology Introduction to Philosophy 3rd ed., and because the bookstore could not obtain the Arete Press edition of Rubin's translation.

For the purpose of a college course text I do not find this edition ideal.The commentary is much too intrusive and distracting.Moreover, this is *not* the same translation as found in Perry/Bratman!Instructors, beware.

For the general reader looking for a guide, however, this might be useful ...

Excellent Introduction To Philosophy
This is probably the best introduction to philosophy that anyone could hope for. Descartes is not hard to read or comprehend but this particular book is unusually helpful to the newcomer. The author tries to give thereader a good idea of what philosophy is about and how to read philsophicalworks. There are detailed questions that instruct the reader on how to"think like Descartes" and to construct logically sound argumentsbased upon minimal assumptions. An excellent introduction to philosophy andto critical thinking. ... Read more

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Between Two Worlds
John Carriero's book offers an interesting take on The Meditations.The traditional interpretations have focused on epistemology and skepticism, these interpretations usually focus on the revolutionary nature of Descartes work.Carriero focuses on Descartes reaction to the scholastic tradition.It is a refreshing. ... Read more