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In a number a passages Descartes appears to insist that “I am, l exist” and its variants are wholly indubitable. These passages present an intractable problem of interpretation in the face of passages in which Descartes allows that any result is dubitable, “I am, I exist” included. Here I pull together a number of elements of Descartes’ system to show how all of these passages hang together. If my analysisis correct, it tells us something about the perspective that Descartes himself thinks we should take in reading the Meditations.

Introduction -- The first meditation -- The second meditation -- The third meditation : the truth rule and the "chief and most common mistake" -- The third meditation : two demonstrations of God's existence -- The fourth meditation -- The fifth meditation -- The sixth meditation.

Certain passages in the Meditations indicate a silence of Descartes before the mystery of God. These passages underscore the inadequacy of reason to penetrate God’s attributes. Descartes underlines the incomprehensibility of God’s infinity and God’s purposes. He evokes an intuitive knowledge of God which transcends the conceptual. Relevant passages in the correspondence of Descartes indicate Descartes’s repeated concern with the limits of philosophical theology and support a deconstruction of the Medítations which privileges its recurrent theologia negativa. Such an interpretation of the religious theory in public and private Cartesian texts contests the persistent “rationalist” interpretation of Descartes, which reduces the theology of the Meditations to a series of deductive proofs.

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.

Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy In Focus contains the excellent and popular Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross translation of Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy . It also contains a portion of the Replies to Objections II, in which Descartes discusses how the method employed in the Meditations, which he calls "analysis," differs from the method of "synthesis" employed by the geometer. In his introduction, Stanley Tweyman provides a fresh and detailed discussion of the relationship between Descartes' Rules for the Direction of the Mind and the method of "analysis," and their applications to the Meditations . The six critical papers drawn together in this book present a broad and exegetical commentary on the Meditations and give an indication of the diversity of scholarly opinion which exists on the topic of method in Descartes' philosophy. An extensive bibliography is also included. Contributors: D. M. Clarke, E. Curley, D. Garber, L. Cohen, J. Hintikka, Georges Moyal, and Stanley Tweyman.

The central theme of this study is that Descartes is a teacher who develops his arguments for the different philosophical orientations of his students. Indeed, according to Cunning, so respectful is Descartes of their orientations that he actually misrepresents his own view in the Meditations on central doctrinal matters like the basis for dualism. The exegetical argument for this is the central argument of the book, though many other aspects of the Meditations are discussed in novel and interesting ways. Descartes describes himself as establishing the duality of mental and physical substances in two stages in the Meditations. It is in Meditation II, he says in the Fourth Replies, where he shows that a ..

For a long time readers of Descartes’s Meditations have argued about whether or not they are to be taken as spiritual exercises. In this paper I show that the later work of Michel Foucault provides us with a new way of approaching this problem. To situate Foucault’sapproach and to reveal his originality, I summarize two influential discussions of the meditational character of Descartes’s Meditations. I then turn to the work of Foucault, give a brief explanation of his idiosyncratic definition of spiritual exercises, and show how his approach permits a deeper appreciation of how the Meditations, as meditations, operate. My argument, following Foucault, is that reading the Meditations as spiritual exercises allows us a fuller grasp of the text precisely because it displaces our “Cartesian” form of subjectivity.

Material Falsity and Error in Descartes' Meditations approaches Descartes' Meditations as an intellectual journey, wherein Descartes' views develop and change as he makes new discoveries about self, God and matter. The first book to focus closely on Descartes' notion of material falsity, it shows how Descartes' account of material falsity and correspondingly his account of crucial notions such as truth, falsehood and error evolves according to the epistemic advances in the Meditations. It also offers important new insights on the crucial role of Descartes' Third Meditation discussion of material falsity in advancing many subsequent arguments in the Meditations. This book will be of interest to those working on Descartes and early modern philosophy. It offers an independent reading on issues of perennial interest, such as Descartes' views on error, truth and falsehood. It also makes important contributions to topics that have been the focus of much recent scholarship, such as Descartes' ethics and his theodicy. Those working on the interface between medieval and modern philosophy will find the discussions on Descartes' debt to predecessors like Suárez and Augustine useful.

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Descartes' Meditations is one of the most widely read philosophical texts and has marked the beginning of what we now consider as modern philosophy. It is the first text that most students of philosophy are introduced to and this Guidebook will be an indispensable introduction to what is undeniably one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy. Gary Hatfield offers a clear and concise introduction to Descartes' background, a careful reading of the Meditations and a methodological investigation of its main themes. As with all the Guidebooks , this is an exemplary companion to any reading of the Meditations.