Customer Reviews:
The Cart was put before the horse.......2007-09-09
Rene Descartes can go to a circle in hades for his mathmatics but his discourse on religion was flawed he had to first prove to himself he existed before he could prove God existed, there is the rub. He is justly regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy because of the questions and problems he created. He helped to distinquish philosophy from science, which is a saving grace. This is a great addition to any library, since it serves to illustrate the evolution of philosophy in our civilization. I would also recommend Deism In American Thought by Woodbridge Riley and of course the Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.
It is what it is...I recommend a book with more commentary for beginners.......2007-05-29
The bare translation...with little to no commentary. It's cheap, though.
Rene Descarte.......2007-03-27
This is an excellent book with good reading and meditations to just sit back relax and enjoy.
Readable translation of two seminal works of philosophy.......2007-03-07
This is a review of the Donald A. Cress translation of Discouse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes.
Philosophers disagree about everything: except about the fact that modern philosophy begins with Descartes. No contemporary philosophers agree with Descartes' positive views. However, Descartes left Western philosophy with a series of puzzles that it continues to wrestle with: how is it possible to know anything? (Descartes' "dream argument" and "evil genius" argument are powerful sources of philosophical skepticism.) What is the relationship between mind and body? (Descartes argues that there is a fundamental metaphysical difference between the two, so they cannot be identical.) Is there some certain, indubitable foundation for knowledge? (Descartes thought that we need one to escape doubt, and that he could provide it.)
Some historical context helps to explain certain features of his writing. In 1521, Martin Luther was excommunicated, beginning the Protestant Reformation and dividing Christianity. Luther encouraged Christians to read the Bible translated into their own languages (e.g., the King James Bible) and use their own individual judgment to interpret it. In 1543, on his deathbed, Copernicus published his book arguing that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the earth (as had been taught by Aristotle). In 1633, Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to renounce his defense of the Copernican hypothesis.
Given the sharp intellectual controversies of his era, it is not surprising that Descartes says he has "realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them" (59). Descartes concludes that the only way to escape his doubts is to reconstruct his beliefs using his own reason, rather than relying on traditional views. In this respect, he is somewhat like Luther. However, mindful of what happened to Galileo, Descartes begins the Meditations with a letter to the Faculty of Sacred Theology in Paris, defending the orthodoxy of his views and pleading for their support. In addition, Descartes wrote the Discourse in French (his own vernacular), but wrote the Meditations in Latin (the language of the Church), "lest weaker minds be in a position to think that they too ought to set out on this path" that he has followed (51).
If you are going to read only one work by Descartes, I recommend the Meditations. (However, you might want to quickly read Part 4 of the Discourse first, since it gives an overview of the whole Meditations.) In the Meditations, Descartes decides that, paradoxically, the only way to overcome his doubts is to doubt everything that can be doubted, until he finds something absolutely certain, upon which he can build up knowledge. (Descartes is therefore an epistemological foundationalist.) Descartes notes that his senses sometimes deceive him. Furthermore, for all he knows, he is merely dreaming right now that he has a body and is sitting in a room writing. It is hard to maintain such doubts, so Descartes resolves to pretend that an "evil genius, supremely powerful and clever," is attempting to deceive him at every step of the way. Descartes ends his First Meditation in this pit of uncertainty.
In the Second Meditation, Descartes realizes that, even if he is mistaken about everything, he still has to think to be deceived, and if he thinks, then he exists. (In Part Four of the Discourse, he phrases this concisely as "I think, therefore I am.") Descartes then realizes that, while he can conceive of himself as a thinking thing without a body, he cannot conceive of himself as a body that never thinks. So while he may, in fact, have a body, his body and his mind are metaphysically distinct. (Basically, since he can conceive of body and mind as separate, therefore they are, in principle, separate.) Thus, Descartes is a metaphysical dualist.
In the Third Meditation, Descartes argues that God exists. He gives a version of the ontological argument for the existence of God (defended before Descartes by St. Anselm, criticized after Descartes by Kant, and still later resurrected by Alvin Plantinga). Contemporary readers, even ones who believe in God, are unlikely to find Descartes' argument here compelling, but it is an important part of his philosophy. Descartes argues that, since we know that God exists, and since we know that God is all good, we can be sure that our senses and our reason are not fundamentally deceptive. (Why would an all-good God make us prone to systematic mistakes?)
But the Third Meditation suggests a puzzle: since God created us, and God is all-good, why do we humans EVER make mistakes? Descartes' answer in the Fourth Meditation is that belief requires both the intellect, which simply perceives ideas, and the will, which chooses whether to believe those ideas. So long as we only choose to believe ideas that we "clearly and distinctly" (87) perceive, we will only believe what is true. Error occurs when we precipitately choose to believe unclear or confused ideas. (Part Two of the Discourse describes the methodology Descartes recommends in a bit more detail.) This may seem like a trivial claim, but Descartes is actually arguing for something controversial (and probably false): we can and should withhold belief from anything of which we are not absolutely certain, and so long as we use our minds correctly, we can be guaranteed to never believe anything false.
The Fifth Meditation gives an alternative formulation of the ontological argument for the existence of God, and suggests that some ideas (such as those of mathematical objects) are innate, so that, "when I first discover them, it seems I am not so much learning something new as recalling something I knew beforehand" (88).
Finally, in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes turns to material objects and sensory knowledge. His general conclusion is that "I must not rashly admit everything that I seem to derive from the senses; but neither, for that matter, should I call everything into doubt" (97). In general, Descartes is concerned in this meditation with how we can have a God-given faculty for discovering the truth, yet so often be in error over sensory matters (e.g., the Sun appearing to be the size of a fist).
I do not read French or Latin myself, so I cannot comment on the accuracy of the translation. However, I will say that it is very readable. Furthermore, the selected bibliography is helpful. I do miss three things that were left out of this translation, though. First, Descartes meant for the Meditations to be read along with a series of "Objections" written by his correspondents and "Replies" he wrote in response. Second, perhaps the most insightful critic of Descartes was Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who raised in correspondence what is still generally considered one of the strongest objections to Descartes' dualism: how can soul and body interact if they are as radically distinct as Descartes suggests? Finally, Descartes' Fourth Meditation emphasizes the distinction between having a property "formally" and "eminently." In Cress's original translation of the Meditations, he has a footnote explaining this distinction. That footnote was left out of this enlarged edition. If these three things were included in this translation, I think I would give it five stars instead of four.
Overly repetitious.......2006-12-06
Descartes seems like the sort of guy who likes the sound of his own voice, not unlike a philosophy professor! He has only a handful of points, a few of them interesting but the majority pure academic fluff, and he spends over 100 pages just reiterating his ideas and logic behind them. It seemed like a modern editor would read the manuscript, and whittle it down to a maximum of 25 pages. I am not surprised that various classes on philosophy only use excerpts of Descartes' work.
I would HIGHLY recommend instead buying an analysis of Descartes' works so that you can alternate back and forth between his original writings and commentary on these writings, as well as responses by other philosophers like Pascal.
Average customer rating:
- Exceptional depth and range
- Poor translation
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Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
Rene Descartes
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ASIN: 0300067739 |
Customer Reviews:
Exceptional depth and range.......2003-05-30
Usually, philosophy books speak only to academic philosophers. This one shows Descartes' influence in a wide range of domains, including math and science, ethics and politics, psychology, and literature and the arts. The nine essays that complement Descartes' texts (the Discourse and Meditations) are accessible, but deeply informed. They have little or no competition. The translation is classic and clean, not fussy. This is not the last word on Descartes. Professorial competition guarantees many more. But this book is both scholarly and provocative.
Poor translation.......2003-04-01
The negative nature of this review reflects upon this particular translation of Descartes' seminal work, not upon the content of the work itself. The edition in question (ISBN: 0330067739), published by Yale University Press and edited by David Weissman, utilizes a translation rendered originally for Cambridge University Press in 1911. Unfortunately, this translation does much to obfuscate a work that should help enlighten.
The saving grace of this edition is that 3/4's of the book consists of nine separate essays, many of which are excellent, that review a broad spectrum of topics pertaining to Descartes and his ideas.
I recommend that you buy this book for the excellent supplementary materials, but look elsewhere for a modern translation (i.e. the John Cottingham translation in the 'new' Cambridge Philosophy series).
Customer Reviews:
Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" is the foundation of philosophy........1999-04-05
Although the Cress version, like most other translations, looses precision in transition from Latin to English, it is still a classic that is a absolute must read for anyone who is serious about understanding metaphysics. Descartes shows that one's consciousness is itself an undeniable fact of existence; so long as conciousness exists it is a certain fact that something exists, namely the conciousness itself. What is that conciousness? It is us. Conscious beings are what we essentially are, says Descartes.
When the first artifical intelligences struggle with the question "what am I?" they will, if they are not only intelligent but also conscious, come to conclusions similar to Descartes'.
Rene Descartes' concept "cogito ergo sum" (often translated, somewhat misleadingly, as "I think therefore I am") stands as one of the few unshaken foundations of modern philosophy. Some philosophers see a fallacy in logic of "cogito ergo sum" but the fallacy is in the translation rather than in the logic. The words "cogito" and "scientia" are very loosely and interchangebly translated as "think" or "knowledge" but they mean quite different things. The cogito phrase, so often translated as "I think therefore I am", really means that conciousness implies existence. Descartes writings certainly have many flaws, such as his weak "proof" of the existence of God. Yet many of his errors may be attributed to his living in the age of the inqusition and his desire to cover is own assets. It is said that when Descartes found out Galileo had been arrested for communicating his astronomical discoveries, Descartes literally ran to puplishing house to stop the presses that were printing his own similar scientific discoveries. The "Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy" is a monument of achievement in modern philosophy. We are conciousness beings, and few books bring the implications of that fact more vividly to live than the "Meditations". If you can't read the original Latin then by all means get your hands on a good translation. Don't rely on some commentator telling you what is or is not of value in Descartes. There is no substitute for the original.
Be sure to follow up Descartes with the philosophical writings of George Berkeley and David Hume. They are giants. If you stand on their shoulders you will see far.
Descartes as founder for the founder of existential thought.......1999-03-23
Even though the writings and musings of Descartes are now universally regarded as being wrong, he's still a worthwhile read. Literally thousands of well-respected critics to his first philosophy created their own philosophies. Mightn't you? Hmmm? Hmmmmmm? Regarded as the founder of Modern Philosophy, the writings of Descartes have been used to bring us to the post-modern writings of Lacan, Camus, and Bernard Tapkis of Tallahassee, FL. I think therefore I am? Sure, a logical fallacy...but, I'll be ...if I would have thought of it on my own.
Customer Reviews:
I think, therefore I read..........2005-10-13
Rene Descartes is often considered the founding father of modern philosophy. A true Renaissance man, he studied Scholastic philosophy and physics as a student, spent time as a volunteer soldier and traveler throughout Europe, studied mathematics, appreciated the arts, and became a noted correspondent with royals and intellectual figures throughout the continent. He died in Sweden while on assignment as tutor to the Queen, Christiana.
Descartes 'Discourse on Method' is a fascinating text, combining the newly-invented form of essay (Descartes was familiar with the Essays of Montaigne) with the same kind of autobiographical impulse that underpins Augustine's Confessions. Descartes writes about his own form of mystical experience, seeing this as almost a kind of revelation that all past knowledge would be superseded, and all problems would eventually be solved by human intellect.
In the Discourse, Descartes formulates logical principles based on reason (which makes it somewhat ironic that this came to him almost as a revelation). Descartes had some appreciation for thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, but he thought that Bacon depended too much upon empirical data, and with Hobbes he disagreed on what would be the criteria for ascertaining certainty.
Descartes was a mathematician at heart, and perhaps had a carry-over of Pythagorean mystical attachment to mathematics, for his sense of reason led him to impute an absolute quality to mathematics; this has major implications for metaphysics and epistemology. Descartes method was a continuation in many ways of the ideas of Plato, Aristotle and the medieval thinkers, for they all tended toward thinking in absolute, universal terms in some degree.
Descartes in his first section discounts much of Scholasticism, stating that the only real absolutes are theology and mathematics; because theology is based upon revelation, it is therefore beyond reason, and thus, mathematics becomes the only rational truth. Descartes develops this idea further with rules of method, which include ideas of intuition, analysis and deduction. He uses some of his method to come up with his greatest proposition:
Cogito ergo sum - - I think, therefore I am
'The Cogito is a first principle from which Descartes will now deduce all that follows.' This permits Descartes to deal both with rational elements and empirical data.
This is an important text; the 'Discourse on Method' is one that I read the summer before I went to college, and makes a good study for those who wish to see the personal element in the development of philosophy.
Great Philosophy in a Not-So-Great Edition.......2004-05-01
There is no question that this book contains great philosophy, but I have some misgivings about the translation here. It's not just that the translation of the Meditations often seems somewhat misleading in the details that are likely to concern serious readers of this work, but that Lafleur's decision to translate various editions of the Meditations and to run them together wasn't a very wise one. Not only does it make the book somewhat harder to read than it should be, but it's questionable whether this provides one with an accurate picture of Descartes's thought. This is an especially important concern since one of the three editions of Descartes's Meditations on which Lafleur relies is a French translation of the Meditations that Descartes approved for publication. To the best of my knowledge, it's not know just how closely Descartes read this text before giving it his approval. So relying on it in providing a translation of the work seems pretty dubious to me. (To his credit, Lafleur makes clear where he's providing material from each translation and he relies on Descartes's original Latin edition as the basic text. Material from the other editions is added in brackets.) Also, the book has a very out-of-date bibliography, one that doesn't appear to have been updated since the translation was first published in the 50s.
That said, there is great philosophy on display here. Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the few works of philosophy that absolutely every educated person needs to read at least once. This is required reading for anyone interested in philosophy or its history, and honestly I don't see how this work can be ignored by anyone interested in the history of ideas. It's also a work that I'd recommend to anyone who wants to be introduced to philosophy by reading the work of a great philosopher. And don't worry: it shouldn't take you more than an afternoon to read through it. But you can, of course, spend the remainder of your life thinking about the ideas contained in this work.
The Meditations has had an incalculable influence on the history of subsequent philosophical thinking. Indeed, according to nearly every history of philosophy you're likely to come across, this work is where modern philosophy begins. It's not that any of Descartes's arguments are startlingly original--many of them have historical precedents--but that Descartes's work was compelling enough to initiate two research programs in philosophy, namely British empiricism and continental rationalism, and to place certain issues (e.g. the mind-body problem, the plausibility of and responses to skepticism, the ontological argument for the existence of God, etc.) on the philosophical agenda for a long time to come.
All of this is material, and a lot more, is covered in roughly sixty pages of text, and it is presented in some of the clearest, most straightforward philosophical prose ever written. Plus, the reader needn't have mastered any arcane jargon or previous work in philosophy to understand Descartes's views. And because it is written as a series of meditations in which Descartes leads us through something like his own process of through about these issues, it makes for relatively easy reading. So the Meditations is a work of value to both newcomers to philosophy and to those with a great deal of philosophical background.
This edition also includes Descartes's Discourse on Method, which, though it isn't as important or philosophically sophisticated as the Meditations, is an essential text for understanding Descartes's conception of his own project. The book begins with interesting intellectual biography involving an account of his disillusionment with the intellectual culture of his time and of how this disillusionment led him to the project of finding a philosophical basis for a systematic scientific conception of the world. This is followed by a short presentation of an early version of the main lines of Descartes's philosophical argument that he would go on to develop in the Meditations. Then Descartes shows how he applied his method to discover a priori "solutions" to certain scientific problems. The Discourse, then, provides one with a better sense of Descartes's self-conception as a philosopher and the role he thought his philosophical system should play in the thinking of his times.
The primary benefit of purchasing this translation of Descartes is that it's quite cheap. It's an adequate edition of the Meditations and the Discourse for students, and I'm sure it's fine for the average reader.
Customer Reviews:
Meditations.......1999-07-29
I'd like to know about the meditations. On book I, II, III... What is Descartes's relationship with his past? Why does he doubt his past and his knowledge? What is his relationship with God?
Customer Reviews:
I think therefore I read..........2005-10-09
Rene Descartes is often considered the founding father of modern philosophy. A true Renaissance man, he studied Scholastic philosophy and physics as a student, spent time as a volunteer soldier and traveler throughout Europe, studied mathematics, appreciated the arts, and became a noted correspondent with royals and intellectual figures throughout the continent. He died in Sweden while on assignment as tutor to the Queen, Christiana.
Descartes 'Discourse on Method' is a fascinating text, combining the newly-invented form of essay (Descartes was familiar with the Essays of Montaigne) with the same kind of autobiographical impulse that underpins Augustine's Confessions. Descartes writes about his own form of mystical experience, seeing this as almost a kind of revelation that all past knowledge would be superseded, and all problems would eventually be solved by human intellect.
In the Discourse, Descartes formulates logical principles based on reason (which makes it somewhat ironic that this came to him almost as a revelation). Descartes had some appreciation for thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, but he thought that Bacon depended too much upon empirical data, and with Hobbes he disagreed on what would be the criteria for ascertaining certainty.
Descartes was a mathematician at heart, and perhaps had a carry-over of Pythagorean mystical attachment to mathematics, for his sense of reason led him to impute an absolute quality to mathematics; this has major implications for metaphysics and epistemology. Descartes method was a continuation in many ways of the ideas of Plato, Aristotle and the medieval thinkers, for they all tended toward thinking in absolute, universal terms in some degree.
Descartes in his first section discounts much of Scholasticism, stating that the only real absolutes are theology and mathematics; because theology is based upon revelation, it is therefore beyond reason, and thus, mathematics becomes the only rational truth. Descartes develops this idea further with rules of method, which include ideas of intuition, analysis and deduction. He uses some of his method to come up with his greatest proposition:
Cogito ergo sum - - I think, therefore I am
'The Cogito is a first principle from which Descartes will now deduce all that follows.' This permits Descartes to deal both with rational elements and empirical data.
The other major piece in this collection, 'The Meditations', includes several different mediations, including that on the existence of the soul, the existence of God, the material world, things we may doubt, and other philosophical problems of the time. These meditations do incorporate Descartes attempt to employ his method to some degree, but at the same time divert into other means. For example, Descartes' meditation on the existence of God is in many ways the Anselm ontological proof revisited, and has a certain circular reasoning to it.
This is an important text, one that I read the summer before I went to college, and makes a good study for those who wish to see the personal element in the development of philosophy.
a brilliant mind at work.......2000-09-29
Descartes has written one of the greatest classics in the history of philosophy. He gets down to the elements of how we can know truth. This is in sharp contrast to the majority of philosophy books that give another mans opinion, but not on how we know truth. Descartes begins his book by saying that there are contrary opinions among philosophers, other people and just in general. For every opinion given there is a contrary opinion, so how do we know truth, if knowing truth is even possible? He writes in his book, that what we know as the world ,could be the creation of a demon who fools us into thinking that what we know is real. So he writes that one should doubt everything. Then he says that someone is doubting, so there must be something real that is doubting. Hence he arrives at his famous self evident principle "I think, therefore I am." He then states that we begin our search for truth on self evident principles such as "Truth exists" and his principle stated above among others. We divide our problem and solve it starting from the easiest to the most difficult. As a final step we take in all the evidence into review. This is an excellent method in which to find truth. His first step though is the most important one, that is, establishing doubt. We can't really know what a thing is and hence we should be doubtful. This is a far better method than the scientific method and far easier to implement. Science does not and cannot arrive at truth, because truth is eternal and has no limit. The most science can do is to have a utility value. That is it can make life easier for us by mastering nature. To find truth we leave that to the religions such as Christianity and Buddhism and also to the philosophers like Descartes.
The most influential person in my life.......2000-07-25
Descartes' contribution to philosophy is undeniable, as well as his place in the history of science and mathematics. Descartes' thinking absolutely changed my life. His skeptical approach and decision to look inward and determine the existence of the self before concerning himself with the rest of the world (and God) was essential to his philosophical system, and influenced me more than any other person's thinking. And it's all laid out in this book. Buy it, read it, and let it change your life forever.
This book is absolutly inspiring.......1999-07-18
Great book, go buy it! Descartes is one the true geniuses of this worl
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