Work · Rationalism
Meditations on First Philosophy
Radical doubt, the cogito, proofs of God and mind–body dualism.
Introduction
The six Latin meditations appeared in Paris in 1641, together with objections that Marin Mersenne had collected from scholars, among them Hobbes, Arnauld and Gassendi, and Descartes’s replies; the second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added a seventh set. The text is written as a sequence of six days of meditation in the first person, which readers are invited to follow. Key steps include the evil deceiver in the first meditation, the piece of wax in the second, the proof of God from the idea of the infinite in the third and the real distinction between mind and body in the sixth. Arnauld’s objection that Descartes argues in a circle is known as the “Cartesian circle”.
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Connections
Builds on
- The City of God (De civitate Dei)c. 426 · Augustine
Responds to
- Outlines of Pyrrhonismc. 200 · Sextus Empiricus
- Essays1580 · Michel de Montaigne
Taken up in
- The Search after Truth1674 · Nicolas Malebranche
- On True and False Ideas1683 · Antoine Arnauld
- Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology1913 · Edmund Husserl
- Cartesian Meditations1931 · Edmund Husserl
- Totality and Infinity1961 · Emmanuel Levinas
- Sources of the Self1989 · Charles Taylor
Criticized in
- Correspondence with Descartes1643 · Elisabeth of Bohemia
- Disquisitio metaphysica1644 · Pierre Gassendi
- Observations upon Experimental Philosophy1666 · Margaret Cavendish
- Pensées1670 · Blaise Pascal
- Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order1677 · Baruch de Spinoza
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding1689 · John Locke
- The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy1690 · Anne Conway
- Monadology1714 · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- On the Impassivity of the Human Mind1734 · Anton Wilhelm Amo
- Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant
- Some Consequences of Four Incapacities1868 · Charles Sanders Peirce
- Being and Time1927 · Martin Heidegger
- Phenomenology of Perception1945 · Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- The Concept of Mind1949 · Gilbert Ryle
- History of Madness (Madness and Civilization)1961 · Michel Foucault
- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature1979 · Richard Rorty
- Reason, Truth and History1981 · Hilary Putnam
- Consciousness Explained1991 · Daniel Dennett
More works by René Descartes
Appears in
- Journey ‘Doubt and the Self’ · Stop 3 of 10
- Journey ‘The Riddle of Consciousness’ · Stop 1 of 10
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