Meditations on First Philosophy

Introduction

The Meditations on First Philosophy (Latin Meditationes de Prima Philosophia) is René Descartes's foundational philosophical work, published in Paris in 1641. Across six meditations, Descartes develops the method of systematic doubt, arrives at the cogito as the indubitable foundation, demonstrates (to his own satisfaction) the existence of God and the reality of the external world, and articulates the mind-body dualism that would shape modern philosophy of mind. It is the single most influential work of modern philosophy and the text most commonly assigned as the entry point into modern philosophical writing.

The Meditations are unusual in form. Written in the first person, structured as six days of intensive solitary reflection, they are closer to a spiritual exercise than to an academic treatise. The reader is meant to follow the meditator's reasoning step by step, performing the doubts and reconstructions in real time. The work's literary structure is integral to its philosophical effect.

Form, length, date, language

The Meditations proper are approximately 30,000 words in Latin, divided into six meditations of varying length. The work was first published in Paris in 1641 with the title Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstratur (Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated). The second edition, published in Amsterdam in 1642, modified the subtitle to in qua Dei existentia et animae humanae a corpore distinctio demonstrantur (in which the existence of God and the distinction of the human soul from the body are demonstrated) — a careful theological adjustment.

The Meditations were published with extensive accompanying material: a Letter of Dedication to the Sorbonne, a Preface to the Reader, a Synopsis, and — most consequentially — the Objections and Replies, six (later seven) sets of critical objections from prominent contemporaries (Caterus, Mersenne, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi, and a group organized by Mersenne; Bourdin's seventh objections appeared in the 1642 edition). The objection sets and Descartes's replies are over twice the length of the Meditations themselves and constitute one of the great works of early modern philosophical dialogue.

Why it was written

Descartes wrote the Meditations to provide a new foundation for philosophy and natural science capable of surviving the collapse of Scholastic Aristotelianism. The political and intellectual context required the reconstruction: the new physics had visibly broken the old framework, the wars of religion had demonstrated the danger of unresolvable theological disputes, and the Pyrrhonian skeptical revival had made the very possibility of secure knowledge a live question.

The Meditations are also — explicitly in the Letter of Dedication — an attempt to demonstrate to the theology faculty of the Sorbonne that the existence of God and the distinction of the soul from the body can be established by natural reason. The framing matters: Descartes presents himself as supplying philosophical foundations for what Catholic doctrine already affirms, not as challenging Christian theology. The political-theological caution shapes the explicit framing throughout, though the philosophical implications run further than the framing acknowledges.

Structure and argument

First Meditation: What can be called into doubt. The systematic doubt. Descartes identifies three successive grounds of doubt: the senses sometimes deceive (so any belief based on the senses might be wrong); we cannot reliably distinguish dreaming from waking (so even seemingly clear perceptions might be illusions); and the hypothesis of an evil deceiver (a powerful being deliberately misleading us about everything, including mathematics and the simplest a priori truths) extends the doubt to its maximum scope.

Second Meditation: The nature of the human mind, which is better known than the body. The cogito. Whatever the deceiver does, I must exist to be deceived. I think, therefore I am is the one belief that cannot be coherently doubted; the very act of doubting confirms it. From this fixed point, Descartes develops the further claim that what I am is essentially a thinking thing, prior to any knowledge of the body. The wax argument (the famous example) shows that even our knowledge of physical objects is fundamentally intellectual rather than sensory.

Third Meditation: The existence of God. The first of Descartes's arguments for God's existence: from the fact that I have an idea of an infinitely perfect being, and the principle that the cause must contain at least as much reality as the effect, it follows that the cause of this idea must itself be infinitely perfect — God. The argument is essentially a causal version of the ontological argument.

Fourth Meditation: Truth and falsity. Why do I sometimes err if God is not a deceiver? Because the will is unbounded (it can assent or refuse assent to anything) but the intellect is bounded (it perceives only some things clearly and distinctly). Error occurs when the will assents to what the intellect has not clearly perceived. The doctrine attempts to preserve human responsibility for error while exonerating God from being its source.

Fifth Meditation: The essence of material things, and the existence of God considered a second time. A second argument for God's existence — the ontological argument proper, derived from the essence of God as a perfect being. Descartes also addresses material things: I have a clear idea of extended substance with mathematical properties, but I cannot yet establish that material things actually exist outside my mind.

Sixth Meditation: The existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body. The argument for the existence of the external world, depending on the non-deceiving God: my strong natural inclination to believe in the external world would be inexplicable as the product of a non-deceiving God if it were systematically false. The Meditation also develops the real distinction between mind and body: I can clearly and distinctly conceive each apart from the other, so God could have created them apart, so they are really distinct.

Key passages

• First Meditation, AT VII.18–23 — the three grounds of doubt; the evil deceiver hypothesis.
• Second Meditation, AT VII.25 — the cogito (ego sum, ego existo; the Latin form is slightly different from the more famous cogito ergo sum of the Discourse and Principles).
• Second Meditation, AT VII.30–33 — the wax argument.
• Third Meditation, AT VII.45–52 — the causal argument for God's existence from the idea of the infinite.
• Fourth Meditation, AT VII.54–62 — the analysis of will, intellect, and error.
• Fifth Meditation, AT VII.65–68 — the ontological argument.
• Sixth Meditation, AT VII.78–81 — the real distinction between mind and body.

Reception history

The Meditations were the central philosophical work of the seventeenth century and have remained so. The Objections and Replies appended to the original publication contain extended engagement with Caterus (a Dutch Catholic theologian), Marin Mersenne, Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld (the Port-Royal theologian), Pierre Gassendi (the major Epicurean of the period), Bourdin (a Jesuit who had attacked Descartes in lectures), and an additional group organized by Mersenne. The seven sets of objections and Descartes's responses constitute one of the great extended philosophical dialogues of the modern period.

The Cartesian movement in France through Malebranche, Arnauld, and the Port-Royal circle developed the framework in various directions. The Dutch reception was bifurcated: Spinoza absorbed and radically transformed it; the orthodox Calvinist establishment was largely hostile. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume developed the empiricist alternative substantially in dialogue with Descartes. Kant's Critical philosophy is in part a response to the failure of the Cartesian foundationalist project.

The twentieth century saw multiple major reception moments. Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (1931) presented phenomenology as a recovery of the Cartesian project. Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) attacked Cartesian dualism (the ghost in the machine) as the foundational error of modern philosophy of mind. Bernard Williams's Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978) is the most influential anglophone monograph; the Cottingham-Stoothoff-Murdoch translation (Cambridge, 1984–1991) made the Meditations and the Objections and Replies widely accessible in modern English.

Contemporary engagement

The standard scholarly Latin text is in volume VII of the Adam-Tannery Oeuvres de Descartes (cited as AT). The standard English translations are Cottingham (Cambridge, 1986; with the Objections and Replies in volume II of the Cambridge edition), Donald Cress (Hackett, 1979), and George Heffernan (Notre Dame, 1990). Major recent scholarly work includes John Carriero's Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes's Meditations (2009), Lilli Alanen's Descartes's Concept of Mind (2003), and the Cambridge Companion to Descartes's Meditations (Stephen Gaukroger, ed., 2006). Active scholarly debates concern the structure of the Cartesian Circle, the relation between the Meditations and the Discourse on Method, the place of the Meditations in Descartes's broader scientific project, and the contemporary applicability of the Cartesian methodology of doubt.

Further reading

• Descartes — the author
• Rationalism — the tradition
• Cogito — the central foundational claim
• Substance — the metaphysical category the Meditations deploys and transforms
• Episteme — the cognitive achievement the Meditations seek to ground
• Spinoza — the most consequential immediate philosophical heir

The foundational work of modern philosophy. Six meditations developing the method, the cogito, and the reconstruction of knowledge.