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Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy

Philosophy asks big questions in careful steps. This page is a short introduction to René Descartes and his Meditations on First Philosophy. It is general education. It is not advice for your own situation, and it is not therapy. It is a short orientation and does not settle scholarly debates.

Who he was

René Descartes (1596-1650) is widely regarded as a key figure in the founding of modern philosophy. He also made contributions in mathematics and physics. This page focuses on his theory of knowledge, as pursued in his famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy.

The book

The Meditations has six Meditations. Descartes circulated it to other philosophers for objections and comments, then answered with detailed replies. Six sets of objections and replies were published with the first edition (1641), and a seventh set was added with the second edition (1642).

Starting again from the foundations

Descartes opens the First Meditation asserting the need "to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations." His method of doubt is meant to complement foundationalism. This is the idea of organizing knowledge like a well-built structure, with unshakable first principles and a superstructure of further propositions anchored to them. Euclid's geometry is an example of such a system, and Descartes' designs for metaphysical knowledge were inspired by it.

Thought experiments about certainty

The doubting arguments of the First Meditation include dreaming doubts and the Evil Genius doubt, which is meant to be a most powerful doubt. These are philosophical thought experiments about what can be known with certainty.

The cogito

The "cogito," usually stated "I think, therefore I am" (Latin: cogito ergo sum), is the canonical formulation of a first truth Descartes treats as most certain. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that this exact formulation does not expressly appear in the Meditations.

Sources

This page draws on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Descartes' Epistemology" (first published Dec 3, 1997; substantive revision Nov 27, 2023) at plato.stanford.edu. The link goes to the organization's own site.

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