Discourse on the Method
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
4. Secondary Readings
René
Descartes. Discourse
on the Method.
Key Terms (tags): certainty, doubt,
scepticism, enlightenment, reasoning,
Supporting References:
- Cottingham, John. "Cogito ergo sum." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. : Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
Perhaps the most celebrated
philosophical dictum of all time, Descartes's ‘I am thinking,
therefore I exist’ is the starting-point of his system of
knowledge. In his Discourse on the Method (1637) Descartes
observes that the proposition je pense, donc je suis is ‘so
firm and sure that the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics
[are] incapable of shaking it’. The dictum, in its better-known
Latin version, also occurs in the Principles of Philosophy
(1644). In the Meditations (1641), the canonical phrase does
not occur, but Descartes argues instead that ‘I am, I exist is
certain as often as it is put forward or conceived in the mind.’
Descartes later observed that the meditator's indubitable awareness
of his own existence was ‘recognized as self-evident by a simple
intuition of the mind’. There is a partial anticipation of
Descartes's Cogito in Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 11. 26.
- "Descartes, René." Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Ed. Calhoun, Craig. : Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference. 2002. Date Accessed 22 Aug. 2013
The following
focuses on the author and not the text.
“Descartes, René (1596–1650) A French mathematician and
philosopher who inaugurated a long tradition of inquiry into
mind–body dualism and the conditions of knowledge. Descartes's
search for a set of principles that would provide certain knowledge
about the world marked him as a rationalist, although not all of his
work fit easily into this category. Descartes was born in France but
spent much of his career in Holland, where he pursued his interest in
mathematics—especially geometry—and where he undertook to develop
a unified and rigorous philosophical system. His first major effort
in this direction was an elaboration of Copernicus's physics and
cosmology, entitled Le Monde. When Descartes learned that
Galileo had been condemned by the Inquisition for similar efforts, he
suppressed the work and turned to the question of knowledge.
“Much of
Descartes's method was based on the apparent certainty and
universality of mathematics—a topic he addressed in Discourses
on the Method (1637). There he introduced the famous notion of
Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”),
which he asserted was the kernel of certainty that underlay all
subsequent claims to knowledge. In response to criticisms of his
positions, Descartes undertook a much more thorough elaboration of
his method and epistemology in Meditations on First Philosophy
(1641). There, he proposed a systematic solution to the problem of
uncertainty and offered a response to empiricist claims that
knowledge was limited to what was received by the senses. The
certainty that one is conscious provides the starting point, he
suggested, from which other assertions can be proved. He ran into
difficulty, however, in acknowledging that all other knowledge might
be illusory. Descartes worked around this problem by developing a
notoriously flimsy proof of the existence of God to establish the
validity of further knowledge claims, based on God's gift to man of
“clear and distinct” concepts, such as mathematics.
“The difficulties
raised by Cartesian dualism—the distinction of mind and body (or
thought and action)—have been among the main preoccupations of the
philosophical tradition and can be said, in many respects, to have
inaugurated philosophical modernity. The body was the province of the
physical sciences—the study of extension and movement—and
Descartes's work gave impetus to that scientific project. The mind,
in contrast, belonged to the realm of theology and metaphysics. In
later years, Descartes sought to work around some of the difficulties
that his ideas had raised, such as the need for some connection
between the mind and body (which he thought might reside in the
pineal gland). As the leading philosopher of the day, his Meditations
(1641) were critically engaged by his contemporaries, including
Thomas Hobbes,
Pierre Gassendi, and Antoine Arnauld.
“Descartes
recapitulated and expanded on his philosophy in The Principles of
Philosophy (1644). He also wrote a more eclectic study of
psychology, physiology, and morals, entitled Passions of the Soul
(1649).”
- Birch, Dinah. "Descartes, René." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
Descartes,
René (1596–1650). French philosopher and mathematician. After a
period of travel, in 1629 he decided to devote himself to philosophy
and settled in the Netherlands, where he remained until 1649, when he
accepted an invitation to visit Sweden, where he died. His main works
are: Discours de la méthode (1637: Discourse on the
Method), Méditations philosophiques (published in
Latin in 1641, in French in 1647: Philosophical Meditations),
Principes de la philosophie (published in Latin in 1644, in
French in 1647: The Principles of Philosophy), and Les
Passions de l'âme (1649: Passions of the Soul). The
influence of these on European thought has been considerable.
Philosophically his starting point is the problem of certainty posed
by *Montaigne's
radical scepticism: in other words, the need for a method that
establishes reliable propositions. Rejecting the accumulated
preconceptions of the past through a process of systematic doubt, he
proposes to reconstruct the whole of philosophy on the basis of
certain self‐evident truths, including notably the existence of the
self in consciousness, the famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think,
therefore I am’). From this basis he attempts to deduce the
existence of God as guarantor of the reliability of the perceptible
world, and thus of its susceptibility to scientific analysis. As a
mathematician (he made major contributions to algebraic notation and
coordinate geometry), he considered mathematical reasoning to be
applicable to the whole of science. Although his astronomical
theories were demolished by Isaac
*Newton, his reduction of matter to the
quantifiable has remained fundamental to science. In epistemology and
ethics, his rigorous mind–body dualism has similarly been immensely
influential. See S. Gaukroger, Descartes (1995).
- Buchanan, Ian. "Enlightenment." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
Enlightenment
(Aufklärung). A broad intellectual movement in Europe characterized
by a foregrounding of the power of reason and a setting aside of
superstition. There is no consensus as to when exactly the
Enlightenment began, but it is not generally thought to have started
much before the publication in 1637 of René Descartes's Discours
de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verité
dans les sciences (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting
One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences), in which the
famous slogan celebrating the centrality of reason ‘Je pense,
donc je suis’ (I think, therefore I am) appears. Other
highpoints include: The Encylopédistes, the group of authors led by
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert who wrote the massive
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts
et des metiers (Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the
sciences, arts, and crafts), between 1751 and 1772, with the express
purpose of changing the way people think by foregrounding
scientifically acquired knowledge and banishing superstition; the
Scottish Enlightenment, contemporaneous with the Encylopédistes,
whose leading figures were David Hume, Adam Smith, and Robert Burns ;
in the US the group of statesmen who wrote the bill of rights were
also considered part of the Enlightenment movement. In critical
theory, however, Enlightenment is usually dated
by the publication in 1784 of Immanuel
*Kant's essay ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was
ist Aufklärung?’ (Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?),
which famously defines Enlightenment as the coming to an end of
humanity's period of intellectual immaturity. See also dialectic
of enlightenment.
- Kirwan, Christopher. "reasoning." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. : Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
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