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WorkRené Descartes

Meditations on the First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul Are Demonstrated

Six meditations that doubt the world down to a single certainty — and were published wrapped in the objections of Hobbes, Gassendi and Arnauld, with Descartes's replies.

by René Descartes360 passages held

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Original title
Meditationes de prima philosophia
First published
(aged 45)
Original language
French

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Overview

The objections came first. Before the Meditations appeared in Latin in 1641, Descartes circulated the manuscript to a set of readers the friar Mersenne had assembled, and printed their attacks alongside his answers — six sets in the first edition, from the theologian Caterus, from Hobbes, from Gassendi, from Arnauld and others, a seventh added by the Jesuit Bourdin in 1642. The six meditations rebuild human knowledge from a single point left standing after Descartes doubts everything he can: the senses, the world, even mathematics, undone by the possibility of a deceiving God or an evil demon. What survives is the thinker in the act of thinking — I am, I exist is true whenever it is put forward — and on that he founds proofs of God and of a mind really distinct from the body. Arnauld saw the crack at once, in what became known as the Cartesian circle: Descartes trusts clear ideas because God guarantees them, and proves God from clear ideas. The objections are not an appendix. The argument was built to be shot at, and the shooting is bound into the book. Rome placed Descartes's works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1663, thirteen years after his death. The Meditations remains the text that made the mind's certainty of itself the starting point of modern thought.

Key concepts

What is the evil demon in the Meditations?

A thought-experiment Descartes introduces in the First Meditation: a being of supreme power and cunning who devotes all his effort to deceiving him, so that the sky, the earth, even his own body might be illusions staged for him. The demon is the strongest possible test of belief. Whatever certainty survives such a deceiver is proof against anything, and that is what Descartes is hunting.

What is the Cartesian circle?

The objection, pressed first by Arnauld, that Descartes reasons in a circle. He trusts clear and distinct ideas because a non-deceiving God guarantees them, yet he proves that God exists using clear and distinct ideas. Each half leans on the other. Whether Descartes escapes it, by treating some perceptions as certain in the moment they are grasped, has been argued ever since.

What are the Objections and Replies?

Before publishing, Descartes circulated the manuscript through the friar Mersenne to a set of readers and printed their attacks alongside his answers. The first 1641 edition carried six sets, from Caterus, Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld and others; a seventh, by the Jesuit Bourdin, was added in 1642. They are not an appendix. The argument was built to be shot at, and the shooting is bound into the book.

What does 'clear and distinct' mean for Descartes?

It is his mark of truth. A perception is clear when it is present and open to an attentive mind, and distinct when it is so sharply separated from all else that it contains nothing but what is clear. Descartes reads the rule off the certainty of his own existence: whatever he grasps as clearly and distinctly as that, he holds, must be true.

What is Cartesian dualism?

The claim that mind and body are two really distinct substances. The mind's whole essence is thought and it occupies no space; the body's essence is extension, being spread out, and it does not think. Descartes argues that because each can be conceived clearly without the other, they can exist apart, which left him and his critics the hard question of how two such different things interact.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Doubting the world down to nothing

How far can doubt be pushed before something refuses to yield? Descartes withholds assent from anything the least bit uncertain, hunting the one belief a deceiver could not shake.

The First Meditation dismantles knowledge deliberately. The senses deceive, so they cannot be trusted; dreaming shows we cannot always tell waking from sleep; and a supremely powerful deceiver, a malicious demon, could make even two and three make five. Descartes treats each of these not as idle worry but as a tool, a corrosive applied to belief until only what cannot be doubted remains. It is methodical doubt, doubt in the service of rebuilding: he suspends every judgment once, so that whatever survives can bear the weight of a science. The demon is hyperbole with a purpose, the strongest test he can devise.

  • skepticism
  • certainty
  • error
  • judgment
  • epistemology
  • foundationalism
  • perception
  • sensation
  • ideas

Enter a dialogue

The thinker that survives every doubt

When everything else has been doubted away, one thing announces itself: whoever doubts must be there to doubt. What kind of certainty is that, and what is the I it delivers?

At the bottom of the doubt Descartes finds the one thing the demon cannot falsify: I am, I exist is true whenever it is put forward. The certainty is not inferred but seen, clear and distinct, and it survives because to doubt it is already to think it. What the I turns out to be is only a thinking thing, a mind, known more immediately than any body. On this single unshakeable point the Meditations refounds knowledge, and from it Descartes reads off the mark of truth itself, whatever he perceives as clearly and distinctly as this.

  • existence
  • self
  • mind
  • self-knowledge
  • certainty
  • truth
  • sense perception

Enter a dialogue

God, the mind, and the body left over

From a single certainty Descartes builds outward to God and to a mind really distinct from its body. The moves were made to be attacked, and the objectors found the crack.

Having secured the thinking self, Descartes argues that the idea of an infinite, perfect being could not have come from a finite mind and so must be planted by God, whose goodness then guarantees that clear and distinct ideas do not deceive. With the deceiver ruled out he proves the mind a substance whose whole essence is thought, really distinct from the extended body. Arnauld named the circle at once: God underwrites clear ideas, yet God is proved from clear ideas. Descartes printed the objections of Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld and others alongside his replies, because the argument was built to be shot at.

  • metaphysics
  • substance
  • mind-body dualism
  • perfection
  • infinity
  • ontology
  • theology
  • essence
  • causation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
360
distinct concepts
272
by passages held, corpus-wide
#89

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: epistemology with perception.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 142 shared passages in all. 85 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologyperception23
certaintyepistemology19
causalitymetaphysics14
epistemologyskepticism13
causalityepistemology11
causalityperfection11
epistemologymetaphysics11
certaintyskepticism8
metaphysicsperfection8
epistemologyperfection6
epistemologyerror5
perceptionskepticism5
causalityperception4
certaintymetaphysics2
certaintyperception2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1637 Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences

    The first of Descartes's books to reach print, and the only one he wrote in French for a general reader; it sketches in a few pages the metaphysics the Meditations would expand four years later in Latin.

     FREN
  2. 1641 Meditations on the First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul Are Demonstrated (Meditationes de prima philosophia) you are here FREN
  3. 1644 Selections from the Principles of Philosophy

    Where the Meditations argues, the Principles teaches: Part I condenses that metaphysics, and Parts II–IV build it out into a mechanical physics of the heavens and the earth — Descartes's bid to become the standard university text.

     FREN
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