Work · Rationalism
Discourse on the Method
Four rules of thought and the first “I think, therefore I am”.
Introduction
The Discourse appeared anonymously in Leiden in 1637, in French, as the preface to three scientific essays: on optics, on meteorology and on geometry, the last of which laid the basis of analytic geometry. Its six parts read partly as an intellectual autobiography: a critique of his schooling, the four rules of method, a provisional morality for life during doubt, the outlines of his metaphysics, a summary of his physics including the idea of animals as machines, and reasons for publishing. Descartes chose French so that people could judge with their natural reason rather than relying on the authority of old books.
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Connections
Responds to
- Essays1580 · Michel de Montaigne
Taken up in
- Logic, or the Art of Thinking (Port-Royal Logic)1662 · Antoine Arnauld
- A Serious Proposal to the Ladies1694 · Mary Astell
- On Pre-Islamic Poetry1926 · Taha Hussein
Criticized in
- The New Science1725 · Giambattista Vico
- The New Scientific Spirit1934 · Gaston Bachelard
- Knowledge of Life1952 · Georges Canguilhem
More works by René Descartes
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