Discourse on the Method
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~23,200 words · 110 passages
Cite this work
- APADescartes. (n.d.). Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth [Discourse on the Method]. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/descartes/discourse-on-the-method-of-rightly-conducting-one-s-reason-and-of-seeking-truth
- MLADescartes. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth [Discourse on the Method]. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/descartes/discourse-on-the-method-of-rightly-conducting-one-s-reason-and-of-seeking-truth.
- ChicagoDescartes. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth [Discourse on the Method]. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/descartes/discourse-on-the-method-of-rightly-conducting-one-s-reason-and-of-seeking-truth.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The story of how Descartes resolved to doubt everything he had learned and to rebuild knowledge from the one certainty that survived: I think, therefore I am.
Context and history
Published in 1637 in Leiden, anonymously and in French — not in Latin, the language of the learned: Descartes wanted it readable, he said, even by women and by people without schooling. It was the preface to three scientific essays (optics, meteors, geometry), but the preface has eaten the book. Written from Holland, where Descartes lived with the caution of a man who had seen what happened to Galileo four years earlier. It is the birth certificate of modern philosophy: the doubting self as the foundation of everything.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
curious in the customs of the past are generally ignorant of those of the present. Besides, fictitious narratives lead us to imagine the possibility of many events that are impossible; and even the most faithful histories, if they do not wholly misrepresent matters, or exaggerate their importance to render the account of them more worthy of perusal, omit, at least, almost always the meanest and least striking of the attendant circumstances; hence it happens that the remainder does not represent the truth, and that such as regulate their conduct by examples drawn from this source, are apt to fall into the extravagances of the knight-errants of romance, and to entertain projects that exceed their powers. I esteemed eloquence highly, and was in raptures with poesy; but I thought that both were gifts of nature rather than fruits of study. Those in whom the faculty of reason is predominant, and who most skillfully dispose their thoughts with a view to render them clear and intelligible, are always the best able to persuade others of the truth of what they lay down, though they should speak only in the language of Lower Brittany, and be wholly ignorant of the rules of rhetoric; and those whose minds are stored with the most agreeable fancies, and who can give expression to them with the greatest embellishment and harmony, are still the best poets, though unacquainted with the art of poetry. I was especially delighted with the mathematics, on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings; but I had not as yet a precise knowledge of their true use; and thinking that they but contributed to the advancement of the mechanical arts, I was astonished that foundations, so strong and solid, should have had no loftier superstructure reared on them.…