Meditations

Rene Descartes

dic 2008 · Cosimo, Inc.

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I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their objects, I will even efface from my consciousness all the images of corporeal things; or at least, because this can hardly be accomplished, I will consider them as empty and false; and thus, holding converse only with myself, and closely examining my nature, I will endeavor to obtain by degrees a more intimate and familiar knowledge of myself. I am a thinking (conscious) thing... although the things which I perceive or imagine are perhaps nothing at all apart from me, I am nevertheless assured that those modes of consciousness which I call perceptions and imaginations, in as far only as they are modes of consciousness, exist in me. -from Meditation III: "Of God: That He Exists" Sometimes called the father of modern philosophy, French mathematician, scientist, and writer RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650) continues to have a deeply profound impact on our modern world. His thinking on how the mind works and what is it capable of has profoundly impacted our understanding of ourselves-he summed up his philosophy with the phrase "I think, therefore I am," which still thrills us-and his influence extends to our own experiments with modern computing and artificial intelligence. This concise discourse on doubt and the nature of truth was written in Latin and first published in 1641 with the subtitle In which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated. Here, Descartes considers: [ Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt [ The Nature of the Human Mind: That It Is Better Known Than the Body [ God, That He Exists [ The True and the False [ The Essence of Material Things [ The Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body Scottish poet, philosopher, and historian JOHN VEITCH (1829-1894) translated Meditations into English in 1852-this is a replica of the 1901 edition.

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Best known for the quote from his Meditations de prima philosophia, or Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), "I think therefore I am," philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes also devoted much of his time to the studies of medicine, anatomy and meteorology. Part of his Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Searching for the Truth in the Sciences (1637) became the foundation for analytic geometry. Descartes is also credited with designing a machine to grind hyperbolic lenses, as part of his interest in optics. Rene Descartes was born in 1596 in La Haye, France. He began his schooling at a Jesuit college before going to Paris to study mathematics and to Poitiers in 1616 to study law. He served in both the Dutch and Bavarian military and settled in Holland in 1629. In 1649, he moved to Stockholm to be a philosophy tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden. He died there in 1650. Because of his general fame and philosophic study of the existence of God, some devout Catholics, thinking he would be canonized a saint, collected relics from his body as it was being transported to France for burial.