Descartes: The Meditations

Six days of doubt and reconstruction with René Descartes

A course on the thought of René Descartes.

What you will learn

Understand methodic doubt as a deliberate tool, not idle scepticism — and why I attack the FOUNDATIONS of belief rather than beliefs one by one.
Follow the escalation: the senses sometimes deceive → the dream argument (no sure mark of waking) → the evil demon, who can make even 2+3=5 doubtful.
Grasp the point of the hyperbolic doubt: to find whether anything at all can survive the most extreme doubt imaginable.
Understand the cogito: even a deceiving demon cannot make me nothing while I think I am something — 'I am, I exist' is necessarily true whenever I conceive it.
Grasp that the I whose existence is certain is a *res cogitans*, a thinking thing, and that 'thinking' covers doubting, affirming, willing, imagining, and sensing.
Follow the wax argument to its conclusion: bodies are known not by the senses or imagination but by the intellect — and the mind is thereby better known than the body.
See how Descartes extracts the general rule — whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive is true — from the cogito, and why he cannot yet fully trust it while the demon's possibility stands.
Follow the causal proof: ideas have 'objective reality'; by the causal principle the idea of an infinite, perfect God must have a cause containing infinite reality — which only God can supply.

First Meditation: The Fire and the Demon — The method of doubt — why I tear everything down to the foundations, the dream that unsettles the senses, and the evil demon who unsettles even arithmetic.
Second Meditation: I Think, Therefore I Am — The one thing the demon cannot take — that I exist whenever I think — and the piece of wax that shows the mind is better known than the body.
Third Meditation: The Idea of the Infinite — The rule of clear and distinct perception, and the first proof of God — that a finite mind could never have produced, by itself, the idea of the infinite.
Fourth Meditation: Why I Ever Go Wrong — If God is no deceiver, why do I err at all? Error as a misuse of free will — the boundless will outrunning the narrow light of the intellect.
Fifth Meditation: The Mountain and the Valley — The essences of material things, known before any experience — and the second proof of God, the ontological argument, where existence belongs to perfection as the valley to the mountain.
Sixth Meditation: The World Rebuilt — That material things exist; the real distinction between mind and body; and the intimate union of the two — with the honest difficulty Princess Elisabeth pressed.

Meditations on First Philosophy — Descartes' central 1641 work: six meditations moving from radical doubt (the evil demon) through the cogito to God, the real distinction of mind and body, and the recovery of the external world.
Discourse on the Method — Descartes' accessible 1637 intellectual autobiography and statement of method — 'I think, therefore I am' in its first published form.
Principles of Philosophy — A 1644 systematic textbook of Descartes' whole philosophy, from metaphysics to physics, written for the schools.
The Passions of the Soul — Descartes' late 1649 treatise on the emotions and the union of mind and body — how soul and body interact.
Rules for the Direction of the Mind — An early, unfinished work (published posthumously) setting out rules for rightly conducting reason and reaching certainty.
Objections and Replies — Published with the Meditations: sets of objections from leading thinkers (Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, Mersenne) with Descartes' detailed replies.

cogito, res cogitans, res extensa, lumen naturale, malin génie, scientia

Part of the Simposeum course library.