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MEDITATIONS ON

FIRST PHILOSOPHY

R D was born at La Haye near Tours on March .He was educated at the Jesuit Collège de la Flèche in Anjou, and at the University of Poitiers, where he took a Licenciate in Law in . Two years later he entered the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau in Holland, and met a local schoolmaster, Isaac Beeckman, who fostered his interest in mathematics and physics. After further travels in Europe he settled in Paris in , and came into contact with scientists, theologians, and philosophers in the circle of the Minim friar Marin Mersenne. At the end of Descartes left for Holland, which he made his home until ; he devoted himself to carrying forward the mathematical, scienti“c, and philosophical work he had begun in Paris. When he learned of the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in , he abandoned his plans to publish a treatise on physics, and under pressure from his friends consented to have the Discourse on the Method printed, with three accompany- ing essays on topics in which he had made discoveries. In his Meditationsappeared, setting out the metaphysical underpinnings of his physical theories; these were accompanied by objections written by contemporary philosophers, and Descartess replies to them. His writings provoked controversy in both France and Holland, where his scienti“c ideas were banned in one university; his works, however (including the Principles of Philosophyof) continued to be published, and to bring him notoriety and renown. In he accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to settle in Stockholm; it was there he died of pneumonia on February. M M

ˆis Centenary Professor of French Literature

and Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. Among his publications are Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion ) and

Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French

Thought II().

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OXFORD WORLD"S CLASSICS

RENÉ DESCARTES

Meditations on

First Philosophy

With Selections from the

Objections and Replies

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

MICHAEL MORIARTY

1 3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Descartes, René, 1596...1650.

[Meditationes de prima philosophia. English] Meditations on first philosophy: with selections from the objections and? replies/ René Descartes translated with an introduction and notes by Michael M?oriarty. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978...0...19...280696...3

1. First philosophy. 2. God"Proof, Ontological. 3. Methodology. 4. Kn?owledge,

Theory of. I. Moriarty, Mike. II. Title.

B1853.E5M67 2008

194--dc22

2007044519

Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India

Printed in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

ISBN 978...0...19...280696...3

13579108642

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsvi

List of Abbreviationsvii

Introductionix

Note on the Text and Translationxli

Select Bibliographyxlvi

A Chronology of René Descartesxlix

MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY

Letter of Dedication

Preface to the Reader

Synopsis of the following Six Meditations

First Meditation

Second Meditation

Third Meditation

Fourth Meditation

Fifth Meditation

Sixth Meditation

THE OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES

Introduction

First Objections and Replies

Second Objections and Replies

Third Objections

Fourth Objections and Replies

Fifth Objections and Replies

Sixth Objections and Replies

Seventh Objections

Explanatory Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have many people to thank for assistance with this edition. In par- ticular, I would like to thank Terence Cave, Hannah Dawson, Susan James, Ian Maclean, and Morag Shiach for their generous assistance and support. I am most grateful to the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press for their valuable comments and suggestions. As series editor, Judith Luna has been an unfailing source of guidance and encouragement. Thanks also to Jeff New for his painstaking and vigilant copy-editing. As always, my colleagues at Queen Mary, University of London, have been a pleasure to work with and along- side. This work was begun in the last stages of a research leave jointly funded by Queen Mary and the Arts and Humanities Research

Council. I am most grateful for this support.

Anyone working on Descartes knows how much he or she owes to the generations of scholars in various disciplines and from many countries whose work has illuminated the life, background, and above all the texts of this author. I hope that my own debts are, however imperfectly, acknowledged in the notes.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AT-uvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vols., rev. edn. (Paris: Vrin, ) BGDMStephen Gaukroger (ed.),The Blackwell Guide to Descartes CCDJohn Cottingham (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to

Descartes(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,)

CHSCPDaniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.),The Cambridge

History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,vols.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) DiscourseDescartes,A Discourse on the Method, ed. and trans.

Ian Maclean, Oxford World"s Classics (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, )

F Descartes,Meditations, French text

JHI Journal of the History of Ideas

L Descartes,Meditations, Latin text

OPDescartes,-uvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, vols., Classiques Garnier (Paris: Garnier, ...) PL Patrologiae cursus completus, Series latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne,...) VS Montaigne,Les Essais,ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier, vols. paginated as one (Paris: Quadrige/Presses

Universitaires de France, [st publ.])

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INTRODUCTION

Descartes"sMeditationsis among the most in"uential texts in the his- tory of Western philosophy. Many thinkers have challenged or rejected his thought, some of them almost totally, but his rigorous questioning of traditional certainties is at the source of most subse- quent philosophical developments. The criticism he has received and continues to receive is a backhanded compliment he would not have appreciated, but an index, nonetheless, of the power of his philosophy.

Descartess Life

Descartes was born in , in La Haye, a town in Touraine (central- western France): the family home was in Châtellerault, in the neigh- bouring province of Poitou. 1

France was emerging from a civil war

between Catholics and Protestants that had lasted for over thirty years. His family"s background was in the legal profession and the royal administration. The oce held by his father conferred noble rank, but such oce-holding nobles had far less prestige than the military nobility. Yet Descartes, as Ian Maclean observes, derived a sense of status from this background, borne out in his later attitudes, including a tendency to refuse to be identi“ed as a professional scholar. 2 Inhe entered the Jesuit college of La Flèche, near Le Mans, where he received an excellent education, which he describes 1 For biographical material I have drawn on Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Geneviève Rodis- Lewis,Descartes: biographie(Paris: Calmann-Lévy, : in English as Descartes: His Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, )); A. C. Grayling, Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in his Times(London: The Free Press, ); Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). I am particularly grateful to Ian Maclean for his comments on a draft of this Introduction as well as on the draft Explana tory Notes. 2 Descartes,A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting Ones Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, ed. and trans. Ian Maclean, Oxford World"s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. viii, xli, xliii. All references to the Discourse are to this edition, which gives a very full account of the context and signi“cance of the text. (I give “rst the Part of the text referred to, and then the page number, so that ii. refers to Part II of the Discourse, the passage in question being found on p. .) in Part I of A Discourse on the Method. After leaving school in he attended the University of Poitiers for a year, emerging with a degree in law. But he did not follow a legal career: instead, in he did what many young gentlemen did, namely volunteer for military service. He enlisted “rst in the army of the United Provinces (the Netherlands) under Prince Maurice of Nassau. During his stay in the Netherlands he met the mathematician and scientist Isaac Beeckman, who became an intellectual inspiration for him. In Januaryhe left Maurice"s army, and travelled to Germany, where he joined the army of the Catholic Maximilian, duke of Bavaria. While billeted at Neuburg in November , sheltering from the winter in a stove-heated room, he began, he tells us in Part II of the Discourse, his search for a new method of seeking truth. On the night of November he had a series of dreams which he associated with intellectual inspiration. He may have been present at the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague in November , the“rst engagement in what became the horri“c Thirty Years War. He returned to France in , travelled to Italy in , returned to France in , and in left for the Netherlands, where he would spend the next twenty years in various places. He seems to have relished the isolation of being a foreigner, and the United Provinces was a more tolerant society than most. In he had a child, Francine, by a servant called Helena: Francine"s death in seems to have been a source of great grief. For much of the s he was engaged in controversy, with Dutch Protestant theologians and with his former disciple Regius. He also conducted a sustained correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, whose intelli- gent and critical engagement with his philosophy encouraged him to develop the psychological and ethical aspects of his thought. In he travelled to Sweden to take up a position at the court of Queen Christina. He died in Stockholm of pneumonia in February Throughout the s and the early s Descartes was develop- ing his scienti“c work, without publishing it. He was committed to the mechanistic conception of the physical world, which has been excellently de“ned as follows: 'All natural phenomena . . . can be explained in terms of the arrangement and motion (or rest) of minute, insensible particles of matter (corpuscles), each of which is characterized exclusively by certain fundamental and irreducibleIntroduction x

Introductionxi

properties"shape, size, and impenetrability. 3

His plans to publish

Le Monde

, a treatise explaining the universe on mechanistic prin- ciples, had to be shelved when, in , the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo for supporting the heliocentric view of the universe, to which Descartes himself was committed. 4 Inhe publishedDiscours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences(A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One"s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences), accom- panied by three essays on optics, geometry, and meteorology. True to its title, the

Discoursesets out a programme and method for

scienti“c research, but does so in the unusual form of an intellectual autobiography designed to justify the apparently strange project of approaching the search for knowledge by rejecting what currently passes for knowledge. Four years later Descartes published the Meditationes de prima philosophia(Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the distinction of the human soul from th e body are demonstrated). This was followed in by the Principia Philosophiae(Principles of Philosophy), which expounded his meta- physical and scienti“c theories in textbook form, and in byLes Passions de l"âme(The Passions of the Soul), which examines mind... body interaction with particular reference to the emotions.

The Genesis of the Meditations

In a letter of

(to Gibieuf, July, AT .); 5 this is normally identi“ed with the un the existence of God and the soul (to Mersenne, November, AT.). This work has been lost or destroyed. In any case, he explains to Mersenne that he wished to postpone publishing his 3 Mechanical Philosophy, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), ?The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,[hereafterCHSCP]), i. ...,at p. . Nadler cites Mersenne, Gassendi, and Boyle as other partisans of this approach. 4 Le Mondewas published posthumously, “rst in in a Latin translation, then in in the original French. See Gaukroger, Descartes,.... 5 The letters AT refer to the standard edition of Descartess works, -uvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vols., rev. edn. (Paris: Vrin, ). The AT page numbers are given in many other editions, including this one?, and are the standard method of referring to Descartess work.

Introductionxii

metaphysical discoveries until he had some idea of how his work in physics would be received (April, AT .). Part IV of the Discourse on the Methoddescribes the authors attempt to nd metaphysical positions solid enough to serve as foun- dations for the edi“ce of the new science. Here Descartes narrates his project of rejecting all those beliefs in the slightest degree open to thinking, therefore I exist) as a “rst principle for his new philoso- phy; the conclusion from the Cogito that he is, essentially, a thinkingquotesdbs_dbs33.pdfusesText_39

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