Discourse on the Method
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~23,200 words · 110 passages
Cite this work
- APADescartes. (n.d.). Discourse on the Method. 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." 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. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/descartes/discourse-on-the-method-of-rightly-conducting-one-s-reason-and-of-seeking-truth.
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.
If this Discourse appear too long to be read at once, it may be divided into six Parts: and, in the first, will be found various considerations touching the Sciences; in the second, the principal rules of the Method which the Author has discovered, in the third, certain of the rules of Morals which he has deduced from this Method; in the fourth, the reasonings by which he establishes the existence of God and of the Human Soul, which are the foundations of his Metaphysic; in the fifth, the order of the Physical questions which he has investigated, and, in particular, the explication of the motion of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to Medicine, as also the difference between the soul of man and that of the brutes; and, in the last, what the Author believes to be required in order to greater advancement in the investigation of Nature than has yet been made, with the reasons that have induced him to write. PART I Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same obj