Meditations on First Philosophy Themes

In the landmark Meditations on First Philosophy, the 17th-century French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher René Descartes presents purely rational arguments for the existence of God and the soul. His work, however, is better known for its method than its conclusions. After noticing that his mind is full of unreliable beliefs, Descartes’s narrator, the Meditator, decides that the only way to be certain about anything is to begin with the very “foundations” of knowledge…

Descartes dedicates Meditation Three and Meditation Five to proving the existence of God. Contemporary readers might find his reasoning convoluted and his interest in God unusual, given that he emphasizes finding truth through pure rationality. Yet Descartes was a devout Catholic and, in his time, rejecting God’s existence was all but unthinkable. Indeed, Descartes’s work was actually considered radical because it doubted God’s existence at all, and because it argued that reason—not faith—should…

René Descartes’s philosophical method centers on using logical reasoning to achieve certain, systematic knowledge. As a result, readers might find it strange that he wrote the Meditations as a first-person story about a Meditator immersed in thought, rather than a direct philosophical treatise explaining and proving his views. What’s more, he covered many of the same ideas in his earlier work Discourse on the Method and his later textbook Principles of Philosophy, but…