Led by René Descartes
About this course
The Set Texts paper asks first-year students to read foundational works in their own argumentative grain. This module takes Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy — the work that opens modern philosophy — and reads it with its author.
The Meditations is unusual among philosophical classics in being written in the first person, as a sequence of six days of meditation that the reader is meant to undertake for themselves. Descartes is therefore the ideal guide: he asks the student to do the doubt, not merely study it. The one thing he insists they grasp from the outset is that the doubt is a tool, not a creed — he does not believe an evil demon deceives him; he builds the most extreme doubt imaginable so that whatever survives it will be unshakable. What survives is the cogito: even a deceived mind must exist in order to be deceived. From that single fixed point Descartes rebuilds — through the existence of a non-deceiving God, the rule that the clear and distinct is true, and at last the external world and the real distinction between mind and body.
The student leaves able to expound the whole movement of the work, to handle its central arguments (the cogito, the causal and ontological proofs of God, substance dualism), and to weigh the objections that have shadowed it for four centuries — above all the Cartesian Circle and the question of whether existence can be a perfection. They read the text directly, citing it by Meditation and paragraph.
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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.