- Length
- 128 pagesCottingham, Meditations on First Philosophy, Cambridge, rev. ed. 1996
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Meditations on First Philosophy
Six days of methodical doubt that produced the one sentence everybody knows and the problem nobody has solved. Descartes wanted a foundation for the new science and found it in the thinking self - and left behind a mind and a body he could not put back together.
- Date
- 1641
- Author
- René Descartes
- Region
- The Dutch Republic
- Language
- Latin
- 1647 French, Duc de Luynes, approved by Descartes Differs from the Latin in places that matter Attested
- 1680 English, William Molyneux First English version Consensus
- 1996 English, John Cottingham Revised edition; the scholarly standard, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 308 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 1441 years
Placed on the Index in 1663 and the standard first text of modern philosophy ever since; almost every position in modern epistemology and philosophy of mind is defined by its distance from this book.
What the book says
Six days of thinking, written in the first person, in which a man dismantles everything he believes to see whether anything survives. On the first day he notices that the senses have deceived him before, that dreaming is indistinguishable from waking while it lasts, and that for all he can prove some powerful deceiver might be feeding him a consistent illusion - so nothing perceived, and not even mathematics, is safe. On the second he finds the one thing the deceiver cannot touch: whatever else is false, he is thinking, so he exists whenever he thinks it. He then asks what this thinking thing is, and takes a piece of wax to the fire to show that what he grasps of a body is not what the senses deliver but what the intellect judges. The third and fifth days argue that God exists, from the presence of an idea he could not have produced and from the concept of a perfect being; the fourth explains error as the will outrunning the understanding. The sixth returns to the body and argues that mind and body are genuinely distinct substances while being intimately joined, and restores the external world on the grounds that a God who is not a deceiver would not have arranged things otherwise.
What it argues
That certainty is available, but only after everything doubtable has been cleared away, and that what remains is the thinking subject. The doubt is a tool rather than a position: Descartes is not a sceptic but is using scepticism at maximum strength to find whatever it cannot reach. What survives is the existence of the thinker, and from there he rebuilds - God, then the reliability of clear and distinct perception, then the external world. The account of mind that emerges is the consequential part: thought and extension are different kinds of thing, a mind is not divisible and a body is, and the mind can be conceived entirely without the body, which he takes to show they are really distinct.
What it answered
Outlines of Pyrrhonism c. 200Sextus Empiricus
Pyrrhonian scepticism as it had been available in Europe since 1562, and as Montaigne had made it fashionable. The strategy is to concede more than any sceptic had claimed and then find the remainder. The other target is scholastic natural philosophy: Descartes needed a foundation for a physics of matter in motion, and the meditations are the metaphysical groundwork for it, which is why so much depends on establishing that bodies are extension and nothing else.
What answered it
The Concept of Mind 1949Gilbert Ryle
Everyone. Arnauld posed the circle - that clear and distinct perception is guaranteed by God, whose existence is established by clear and distinct perception - and the charge has never been fully answered. Elisabeth of Bohemia asked in correspondence how an unextended mind could move an extended body, which is the interaction problem and remains the standing objection to dualism. Spinoza and Leibniz rebuilt the metaphysics to avoid it; Ryle, three centuries later, argued that the whole picture was a category mistake. Contemporary philosophy of mind is still organised around the problem this book created.
How it argues
In the first person and across six days, a form borrowed from religious meditation and turned to a different use. The reader is meant to perform the doubt rather than watch it performed, which is why the book is short and why it works on people who have read no philosophy. Descartes then did something unusual: he circulated the manuscript, collected objections from six philosophers including Hobbes and Gassendi, and printed them with his replies. The objections are longer than the meditations and are where the arguments get tested.
The moment
The Dutch Republic in the 1640s, where Descartes had lived for twenty years and where it was possible to publish. He had suppressed an earlier book on the world after hearing of Galileo's condemnation in 1633, and the caution shows: the Meditations is dedicated to the theologians of the Sorbonne, and the arguments for God are placed where a reader could not miss them. It went on the Index in 1663 regardless.
How it travelled
Immediately and permanently. Printed with its own objections, translated into French within six years, condemned by the Church and banned at some universities, and adopted as the starting point of modern philosophy by a tradition that mostly disagreed with it. The first-person method spread beyond philosophy: the idea that one might reach certainty by introspection, and that the mind is better known than the body, became a general assumption of European thought for two centuries.
The strongest objection
Elisabeth's, and it is a question rather than a refutation, which is why it has lasted. If mind is unextended and body is extended, and causation between bodies works by contact and motion, then how does a mind move an arm? Descartes' answers to her were evasive, and his eventual suggestion that the union is known by experience rather than by intellect concedes that the system cannot explain the one relation everybody has. Ryle's version three centuries later is more aggressive but less searching: Elisabeth grants the framework and shows it cannot do its job, which is harder to escape than being told the framework was a mistake.
Why read it
Because it takes two hours, requires nothing, and is the best-made piece of philosophical writing in the modern period - the first meditation in particular is close to perfect. Read the objections and replies afterwards, especially Arnauld's and Gassendi's; encountering the book without them is encountering half of what Descartes published.
- First printed
- 1641
- First in English
- 1680
- Digitised
- Yes
The objections and replies are part of the work and are longer than the meditations themselves; the objectors include Hobbes, Arnauld and Gassendi. A French translation of 1647 was approved by Descartes and differs from the Latin in places.
Veitch's Victorian English is public domain. Cottingham's and the Cottingham-Stoothoff-Murdoch complete works are in copyright and are what scholarship uses.
Where it stands
Live, and mostly as an opponent. Almost nobody defends substance dualism, but the problems Descartes posed - what can be known with certainty, how the mental relates to the physical, whether introspection is privileged - are the working problems of two subfields, and every account of consciousness is measured against the difficulty he identified.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain and Veitch's English is too, but the sentences everyone knows circulate in modern in-copyright translations and the Latin and French versions differ. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the circle Arnauld identified is genuinely vicious is argued to this day, with defenders distinguishing what is clearly perceived at the moment from what is remembered as having been perceived. Whether Descartes read Sextus directly is unresolved. Whether the arguments for God are sincere or are placed to satisfy the censors is a persistent suspicion that most scholars reject. And the French translation of 1647, which Descartes approved, differs from the Latin at points that matter, so even the text is not quite single.