PHIL 150 · Set Texts — Descartes' Meditations

Led by René Descartes

The second set text of the Cambridge Part IA Philosophy syllabus, read with Descartes himself. The Meditations is written to be performed, not observed — six days of solitary doubt that tear down every uncertain belief in search of one that cannot be shaken. The student doubts alongside him: through the senses, through dreaming, through the evil demon, to the cogito, and then back out again — rebuilding God, the external world, and the distinction between mind and body, while testing the cracks (the Cartesian Circle, the ontological argument) that have occupied philosophers ever since.

1. Module 2 ○ Open

   Descartes' Meditations: Doubt, the Cogito, and the Rebuilding of Knowledge

   Led by René Descartes

   The question

   What, if anything, can I know with absolute certainty — and if I can find even one such thing, how much of the rest of knowledge can I rebuild on it? Descartes' *Meditations* stakes everything on this. It demolishes every belief that admits the slightest doubt, descending through the unreliable senses, the dreaming argument, and the hypothesis of an all-powerful deceiver, until it reaches the one thing the deceiver cannot touch: that I, who am being deceived, must exist as a thinking thing. From that foundation the work attempts to recover God, mathematics, the material world, and the relation between mind and body. The module reads the six Meditations as the single sustained argument they are, and asks at each step whether the rebuilding really holds.

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