Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies

Forsideomslag
Cambridge University Press, 18. apr. 1996 - 120 sider
The Meditations, one of the key texts of Western philosophy, is the most widely studied of all Descartes' writings. This authoritative translation by John Cottingham, taken from the much acclaimed three-volume Cambridge edition of the Philosophical Writings of Descartes, is based upon the best available texts and presents Descartes' central metaphysical writings in clear, readable modern English. As well as the complete text of the Meditations, the reader will find a thematic abridgement of the Objections and Replies (which were originally published with the Meditations) containing Descartes' replies to his critics. These extracts, specially selected for the present volume, indicate the main philosophical difficulties which occurred to Descartes' contemporaries and show how Descartes developed and clarified his arguments in response. This edition contains a new comprehensive introduction to Descartes' philosophy by John Cottingham and the classic introductory essay on the Meditations by Bernard Williams.
 

Indhold

Dedicatory letter to the Sorbonne
3
Preface to the reader
6
Synopsis of the following six Meditations
9
What can be called into doubt
12
The nature of the human mind and how it is better known than the body
16
The existence of God
24
Truth and falsity
37
The essence of material things and the existence of God considered a second time
44
The nature of thought
74
The piece of wax
76
On Meditation Three
78
The idea of God
80
Objective reality
84
God author of my existence
86
On Meditation Four
90
The indifference of the will
92

The existence of material things and the real distinction between mind and body
50
Selections from the Objections and Replies
63
The dreaming argument
65
Certainty in dreams
66
On Meditation Two
68
Sum res cogitans I am a thinking thing
69
On Meditation Five
95
Clear and distinct perception and the Cartesian Circle
102
On Meditation Six
107
Index
117
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Om forfatteren (1996)

Best known for the quote from his Meditations de prima philosophia, or Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), "I think therefore I am," philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes also devoted much of his time to the studies of medicine, anatomy and meteorology. Part of his Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Searching for the Truth in the Sciences (1637) became the foundation for analytic geometry. Descartes is also credited with designing a machine to grind hyperbolic lenses, as part of his interest in optics. Rene Descartes was born in 1596 in La Haye, France. He began his schooling at a Jesuit college before going to Paris to study mathematics and to Poitiers in 1616 to study law. He served in both the Dutch and Bavarian military and settled in Holland in 1629. In 1649, he moved to Stockholm to be a philosophy tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden. He died there in 1650. Because of his general fame and philosophic study of the existence of God, some devout Catholics, thinking he would be canonized a saint, collected relics from his body as it was being transported to France for burial.

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